A couple of videos and a Reuters new story about Nokdo, an island in the Yellow Sea, really got my attention. All painted a rather bleak picture of population decline within a span of less than five decades. Made up of a single compact village...
Home since February 1, 2009 has been room 301 in the Yesung Life Officetel. It is located just southeast of Gangnam Station, where 110,000 people board the subway and another 110,000 alight from it every day. A creature of habit, I do not visit...
My ancestors—at least on the paternal side—came from a small village named Pennington in Cumbria, located in northwestern England. Presbyterians, they crossed the water to the Isle of Man and then on to Ireland. They lived a few generations among...
“I was brought up in the greatest country in the world. Patriotism isn’t a matter of flag-waving but of work ethic and respect for authority.” That line came from an interview with Dick Young who covered sports—mostly baseball and boxing—in a...
Guilt motivated me to come back to these towns I had visited just a week earlier because both deserved a closer look. The taxi driver dropped me off in front of Ms. Lee’s Mexican chicken restaurant, but it was closed. So much for my lunch plans!...
While Melinda Ann French and I are both Dallas natives, we moved in very different circles. Second daughter of an aerospace engineer, she was valedictorian at the all-female Ursuline Academy. Me, I was a face in the crowd at a big public high...
Having recently completed Charles J. Hanley’s Ghost Flames / Life & Death in a Hidden War / Korea 1950−1953, I decided to embark on this day trip to a couple of towns in the eastern reaches of Gyeonggi Province. A bus ride, a subway ride and...
Nearly 200 years have passed since Romania—with some prodding by the Ottomans, the Russians, the Austrians, the British and the French—first discussed building a canal to link the Danube with the Black Sea. Its main portion of the river ran north...
Saturday morning, and no sooner had I stepped out of the subway train at Gangbyeon Station than this man accosted me. He noted that I was a foreigner and thus maybe an easy mark. Equally monolingual, he indicated that he was hungry and wanted me...
All right, I come from a different time. The Southwest Conference ruled supreme in my youth. Kern Tips’ radio broadcasts, the Cotton Bowl on January 1, colorful pennants representing Texas, Rice, SMU, Baylor, Texas Tech, Texas A&M...
A spinal fusion (ouch!) performed by Dr. T. Wiley Hodges at Presbyterian Hospital on June 5, 1970 effectively removed me from the Bryan Adams basketball team. There was just one in those days, limited to boys. Girls never played...
The Tokyo Olympics of 2021 are about to begin, and that is reason enough to hark back some 85 years. I refer to the so-called Nazi Games of 1936, held at Berlin’s new 110,000-seat Olympic Stadium. Swastikas were flying everywhere, as were chants...
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