Distractions, reflections

Friday night, and I really needed to get out of the house. I’ve been reading about pork bone soup, so I suggested to Diana and Noah — the only son at home that evening — that we check it out. We went drove up to Ka Chi in Koreatown.

The interior is modest. The impressionist paintings on the wall were an interesting selection for a local Korean restaurant. We ordered the pork bone soup, and some dumplings.

The pork bone soup tasted homemade. So homemade … that we’ve made similar at home. I guess that we’re untraditional in modern Western society, but traditional in our Chinese roots that we make soup broth from scratch. The taste of the Korean soup was a little different from ours, but that degree of variation isn’t unusual from cook to cook. Read the rest of this entry →

With an estimated 13 hour drive from Toronto to Madison Wisconsin, I might have flown to the ISSS 2008 meeting. However, with Adam and Allenna to share in the driving, we decided to take the minivan. I drove the first leg to Sarnia, and we stopped for lunch in Port Huron. I slept through most of Michigan, and we took a break for driving with a time-boxed stop for shopping at the Lighthouse Place Outlet in Michigan City, Indiana.

Although the cyclone tower elicits visions of nuclear power, the Michigan City Generating Station is coal-powered. The three of us split up so that we each had time to visit two or three stores, and then we were back on the road.

There were traffic diversions so we didn’t immediately find our way back onto the Indiana Toll Road. We wanted to get the most amount of mileage before the sun set, and Allenna and Adam were indecisive about what to do for dinner. As I drove was driving northbound through Chicago on the Dan Ryan Expressway, I saw a sign for Koreatown on Lawrence Avenue. I immediately headed for the exit, driving east. It’s been years since I’ve been in the neighbourhood. It’s not just Korean, it’s multi-ethnic, and there were lots of interesting choices for restaurants.

We decided to stay on the Korean theme, and picked Chicago Kalbi Restaurant. The booths on both sides of the restaurant have grills and vents, and were full. Read the rest of this entry →