Track championships and BTS concert

Acadian qualified for the Marin County Middle School track championships, where he ran the mile. His PR for the season was 6:02. We are very proud of him. 

When I first heard about BTS performing at Stanford Stadium after a 4 year break from music (so that they could all do their Korean military service) I tried in vain to get these highly coveted tickets. The 3 days they were performing at Stanford was their only stop in Northern CA. I even signed up for an ARMY membership, which is what BTS fans are called. ARMY=Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth which alludes to their hip hop roots. Through the help of Kyusik's high school friend, who connected us to a journalist who has written articles in the Atlantic about BTS, we managed to get 3 tickets at their face value of $300/each. The concert happened to be on the Tuesday that Acadian turned 12, and since Bryce had already accompanied me to a Coldplay concert at Stanford, he said he'd be fine skipping out. It all worked out well as Kyusik refused to pay $700/each for 4 tickets and Bryce needed to study for finals anyway. 

The night of the concert was a very busy day where I had to hurry back from an event at UCSF in Mission Bay and Acadian almost missed the bus from Marin because he was still signed up to take the late bus home. We barely made it to my friend's house, where we borrowed bikes to make the trek to the stadium to avoid the $100 parking fees. We had a pretty good view of the stage except for the fact that it had to start while it was still light out due to the hard stop by 10 pm. With the smoke effects in the beginning, it made it hard to see them performing, unless we looked at them being projected on the large screens. We were also not familiar with a lot of their songs and couldn't appreciate their dancing as the cameras would often zoom in on their faces, but their voices and the sound were great. We were especially excited to hear them perform Dynamite, which is first song I heard of theirs thanks to Jasper. We have since learned a lot more about them and can now distinguish all 7 of them. I already admired them for being honest about their mental health struggles, redefining what masculinity is, and spreading Korean culture but am now even more of a fan as they are incredibly talented and versatile as singers, rappers, and dancers, write their songs, and still strive to improve themselves as performers.  








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running to stay warm

Image
The power situation in Zimbabwe leaves much to be desired. My colleagues and Viv have all informed us that it has recently worsened. Fortunately, the cottage has a backup solar powered generator, but during outages, which can last up to 18 hours or longer, we cannot use the microwave, toaster, washing machine, tea kettle, oven, etc. Internet connectivity is also not great. Kyusik and I have repeatedly been dropped from our Zoom calls. There is no dryer either, so we have to hang up all of our clothes on a clothesline outside. At least we are able to use the gas stove, so we have been frying or toasting our bread in a pan and boiling water or heating up leftovers on the stove. It has also been pretty cloudy most of the time, which means that it doesn't ever warm up in the cottage. The only ways to get warm include taking a shower, getting into bed, building a fire (which only warms up the living area), and going for a run. Last week, while I was gone for 2.5 days in Mutare, a city a...
Read more

Tokyo

Image
By Bryce In Tokyo we did many things, and the main thing we did was eat Japanese food. There were 5 big highlights of Tokyo. The first one was a shaved ice place. The shaved ice place had many interesting flavors, but these are the ones we chose. Me: strawberry shortcake Mommy: matcha Daddy: chestnut and Acadian: chocolate raspberry. Mine came first, and in all the shaved ice were little chunks of sweet stuff to add texture. I liked mine the best. Another place we went to was a yakitori restaurant. It was very fancy, and the food was good. Yakitori is chicken that is cooked on skewers. I got chicken skin yakitori, egg yakitori, thigh and onions yakitori, and some rice. The chef serving our food said that we were polite and told Acadian that sticking his chopsticks in his rice was offensive to some Japanese people. After finishing, he walked us out the door. The third place was a curry restaurant. It had tonkatsu and tempura with the curry, and it was really good. My favorite was the to...
Read more

Bryce in CDMX

Image
Bryce applied and was accepted to a 10-day Design and Digital Fabrication trip for 10 students from his high school. He is the only one who doesn't speak Spanish, so he did a bit of Duolingo prior to his departure. He complained about having to conjugate verbs and that there are feminine and masculine articles, nouns, and adjectives. I am glad he is having such a rich cultural experience, especially since he was on a school backpacking trip when Kyusik, Acadian, and I went to Mexico City two years ago.  He is staying at a Hilton in the Cen tro  Histórico  and has a packed schedule . I dropped him off at the airport on Friday morning. It was the first time he's travelled anywhere without us. We've been getting daily photo updates from the two teachers chaperoning the trip. Samu is the Technical Arts Department Chair, and José is a math teacher.  They are collaborating with a local artist named Dinorah Martínez Schulte , who uses 3D modeling to create sustainable build...
Read more