Our friends Hyangsun and Tony celebrated their baby girl’s 100th day last Sunday, and we got to be a part of the festivities! Baby April (SunMi) was born on April 1 this year, so she’s almost exactly a year younger than Mio. (Hyangsun and Tony had been expecting her to be born in May, and they actually came to Mio’s birthday party on March 31.. and then April was born the next day, a month before her due date!)Â The decorations were beautiful and all the food was delicious! Here are some pictures we took at the party…
Such pretty decorations!
100th Day ricecake… all the guests got to take a piece home at the end, and it was so delicious!
Brownie bites!
So much delicious food!
The lemon chicken was my favorite.
Hyangsun welcoming everyone
Happy 100 Days, April!
The kids were excited about the desserts!
Mio was very interested in the balloons
Curiously looking at pictures of April
Opening the present we got for April – she’ll look so cute in the dress!
Mio and I playing with the balloons
As usual, Mio got lots of attention from the ladies.
JinWoo and Mio in the doorway. Cutiepies!
Lovely party favor boxes for everyone to take home.
It was a really delightful celebration! Thank you Hyangsun and Tony for inviting us to celebrate April’s arrival! We can’t wait to watch her grow. 🙂
August was a banner month of visiting friends! Besides my family, who came to visit earlier in the month, we had the pleasure of seeing some of my college friends who were in town the past couple weeks. Schedules were busy and meeting times were limited, but it was so nice to see some familiar faces….
A couple of weeks ago, we had dinner with Jamie when she stopped by San Francisco for a weekend after completing her internship at Samsung in South Korea. We unfortunately could only meet her for dinner on a Friday night because we were in Las Vegas the rest of the weekend, but we caught up over some delicious seafood at R&G Lounge in San Francisco. Jamie was only a freshman when I was a senior, but she seems so grown up now! It made me so proud! (And at the same time made me feel old! haha*)
With Jamie at dinner at R&G Lounge.First time seeing Jamie in over three years!
This past weekend, Luice and Stephanie were in town for their cousin’s wedding, and they were able to make some time for a short brunch before they had to rush off to the nuptials. I was so happy to see the Woo sisters again! 😀 We went to San Tung in Inner Sunset, famous for their dry-fried chicken wings!
Brunch at San Tung with Stephanie, Luice, and Sue!
Loved seeing everyone again!
In addition to visitors, I was excited to have two friends from back East move to the area this month as well. Sue, who came to visit last month, landed an awesome job out here at a renowned architecture firm, and our friends April and Ed (now engaged!) made the move earlier this month for April to start her PhD program at UC Berkeley. We’re so happy to have so many new neighbors from back home! 😀
We’ve been lucky the past couple weeks to have some of our friends from the East Coast in the area on separate occasions — living on the other side of the country, we don’t get many opportunities to see my friends from back home, so it’s always nice when they come to visit San Francisco.
A couple weeks ago, April and Ed came to visit. April and I were close friends in middle school, and although we lost touch after we moved on to go to separate high schools and universities, she got back in touch with me right before I moved to California and she and Ed were able to make it to our wedding two years ago! April and Ed live in gorgeous Georgetown back in DC, but April just got accepted at UC Berkeley so she has decided to get her PhD there starting in the fall. They were visiting the area to see the school, so we caught up with them over dinner in Berkeley. They will both be moving to the Bay Area in August, and I’m so excited that I’ll have one of my dearest childhood friends nearby again!
Having dinner with April and Ed at La Med in Berkeley.
This past weekend, we got to spend a whole day on Saturday with our friends Kathleen and Carlos. I went to both middle school and high school with Kathleen, and they were in the city this weekend for a conference that Carlos was attending.We spent the day at the farmer’s market by the Ferry Building and at Pier 39 before meeting up with Greg, another one of our good high school friends who lives in the city, over dinner. Here are some pictures!
Dan and I with Kathleen and Carlos at the Ferry Building in San Francisco
Enjoying some mouthwatering rotisserie chicken from the Roli Roti truck!
Dan with a Scharffen Berger mini-cake from the Miette bakery. So round and cute!
Walked over to Fisherman's Wharf... it was a windy day at Pier 39.
Kathleen and Carlos -- cute couple!
Kathleen and I at Pier 39.
The boys.
With a lobster at Fisherman's Wharf...
Greg took us to dinner at Nirvana, a delicious Burmese restaurant in the Castro.
It’s always nice to see some familiar faces from back home — it makes me feel a little less homesick. I love that even though it’s been well over a decade since middle school and high school, we can still pick up right where we left off. 🙂
Whether it be here in the Bay Area or the next time we’re back in DC, I can’t wait to see more of the friends I left back East. I miss everyone so much!
I can’t believe it’s already April! It feels like just the other day we were ringing in the new year, and a quarter of the year has already passed us by. April has always held a lot of meaning and memories for me.
In school, it was always characteristically the busiest month of the year for me, in terms of putting on International Street Fair and the fact that most of our APIA events for AASU took place during April.
This April marks seven years since Dan and I have been together.
And it was on that fateful day of April 16th three years ago that thousands of lives at our university were forever altered by the actions of a single gunman.
Especially due to this last incident, I can’t really say that I can look back on all of my memories of April with fondness, but it has certainly always been a very emotionally loaded month for me. Since moving to California, April has always been the month I feel the strongest pangs of homesickness. My favorite flower is the cherry blossom, and there’s nothing more gorgeous in April than the 3,800 cherry blossom trees that come into full bloom for a couple weeks every year around the Tidal Basin of the Potomac.
This lovely scene in Washington, DC used to be only a 15-minute drive away from me when I lived in Northern Virginia, but I have not had the pleasure of seeing it in years, due to college and moving out to California, and I have really come to miss it.
The ephemeral nature of the cherry blossoms remind us of the transience of life — characterized by their amazing beauty when in bloom and their swifth death shortly afterwards, the blossoms have often been regarded as a symbol of mortality by the Japanese, and prominently appears in various forms of Japanese art, music and culture. Cherry blossoms, despite their fleeting lifetime every spring, still effloresce and flourish every year, and quickly but gracefully wilt away once they have reached their peak. It’s a reminder of the brevity and delicate aspect of our own human lives, and the importance of living each day to the fullest with no regrets, as if it were our last.
As cheesy as this may sound, I actually have a cherry blossom playlist on my iPod and I have it on repeat every spring when it’s cherry blossom season. There are countless songs about cherry blossoms in Japanese music, but these are my personal top five.
Angela Aki is a half Japanese, half Italian-American singer-songwriter and pianist who grew up in Japan but attended George Washington University — she even has ties to my hometown of Vienna, Virginia, where she recorded her first English album These Words at Jammin Java. She has said that the cherry blossoms she sings of in this song are those in DC, and how they reminded her of her home in Japan. Angela Aki has a really beautiful, powerful voice and this song is one of my favorites by her.
4. 「ã•ãらã€by ケツメイシ (Sakura by Ketsumeishi)
I love this song — it’s a sad song about lost love, but the lyrics are beautiful. I also like the upbeat tempo and the “rap” that comes in here and there. My good friend Richard from school used to sing this song every time we went karaoke, without fail — and was pretty good at it, too!
3. 「桜ã€by コブクム(Sakura by Kobukuro)
Kobukuro’s Sakura is a true classic! I love all of Kobukuro’s ballads. This song also has a tinge of sadness, but the ultimate message is that of hope and having the strength to move forward with your life beyond loss and sorrow. It’s about becoming as strong as the single flower that endures through raging storms and strong winds to see the moment when the rain lets up.
2. 「ã•ãら （独唱）ã€by 森山直太朗 (Sakura (Solo) by Naotaro Moriyama)
This hit song, released in 2003, was Moriyama’s big break and launched him into superstardom. It’s become one of the most popular songs of the last decade, a staple graduation anthem often sung at commencement ceremonies across Japan. The style he sings in seems more traditional than modern, and it really is a classic graduation song in that it sings about the blossoming of youth and the inevitability of parting ways with friends. There are various versions out there, but the one here is his solo, accompanied by piano. I love this other version as well, in which Moriyama is backed by a chorus.
1. 「桜å‚ã€by ç¦å±±é›…æ²» (Sakura zaka by Masaharu Fukuyama)
This is my personal favorite! I fell in love with it when first hearing it in 2000 when it was released, and still love it ten years later. It is one of the most romantic songs I’ve ever heard, although it’s very bittersweet in that it is (again) about a love that has been lost. The soft melody, Fukuyama’s serene vocals and the depth of the lyrics has made it a classic favorite for me. It was a huge hit in Japan as well, selling 750,000 copies in its first week and it remained at the top of the charts for three consecutive weeks; it has sold over 2,300,000 copies overall on the Oricon charts, making it one of Fukuyama’s most successful songs.
I have a friend who can sing the song particularly well and he sang it on guitar for us once, which caused tears to spring to my eyes. I literally melted….
