A long-time opponent of zoos, my up-close experience with wild animals has been somewhat limited.  A trip through SE Asia years ago provided brushes with iguanas, water buffalo, and the ubiquitous gecko, but sightings of elephants or tigers evaded me; I refused to visit them in camps, wary of bearing witness to animals who underwent training for the sole purpose of entertaining humans.  Wild cre ...

Waking to 6 a.m. rain and rooster calls, fried eggs for breakfast, fried eggs for dinner, packs of children trailing us on the Barangay dirt road, a marching band that travels from house to house each year for forty days, the sea-green river, wide wooden floor planks of a 15th-century church, cats, a clock tower, bananas and Red Horse beer, a porch rope hammock and again, rain, beading on the leaf ...

It’s 12:25 a.m. on Sunday, the eve before Korea’s Lunar New Year, temperature for tomorrow predicted at -1.  I’ve been typing away on a couple marketing projects all day,  while Joe fried beans for seven-layer dip, trucked to Home Plus for a bottle of wine, some  Johnnie Walker Red, a pineapple, other colourful things. Now he is chopping mushrooms for pasta salad, preparing fo ...

We stepped out Palazzo’s doors after a breakfast of eggs and instant coffee, our bags still newly packed, the port a 10-minute cab ride away, our boat to Bohol scheduled to depart at noon.  A boy smiled to me from the Pensionne’s road and the cab pulled up, a figurine of Mary dangling from the rearview mirror as the driver placed our bags in the trunk and we piled into the back.  Dur ...

View from our hotel room in Cebu City

We’re back in Busan, with stories to tell. I’ve got a few scrapes from a motorcycle spill, and our bank accounts took a dip after we had to buy brand new full-fare plane tickets back to Korea following a missed flight due to a cancelled boat–but the trip was wonderful.

Hello friends, family, and all my Coco Busan readers out there! Wishing you all very Happy Holidays!  I hope this finds you relaxing with awesome people, sweet tunes, and something warm, cozy and fireplace-ish.  This week I was really craving a hangout around a crackling fire, and also remembering past seasonal festivities such as Boxing Day shenanigans in Victoria and chill-out time with my mom ...

On October 16th, around 2 am, after the last guests had left from a party Joe and I threw at my apartment called October Shindizzle, I checked my email.  Top of the inbox was a surprise message from my dad, which read: Hi Courtney; How are you doing?

Yep–one more post on Gyeongju.  It’s not every day I get to ride around on a fall afternoon in the Korean countryside…so I took a lot of pics. Enjoy, and thanks for reading, everyone! Hanging to dry

One of my favourite people in the world is a guy called Stu.   We met somewhere back in the Doc-Martened recesses of grade 10, circa 1994, in the parking lot or the multi-purpose room or the blue-lockered hallways of Stelly’s Secondary, the exact moment and location either erased or too far embedded in my memory to recall, but the friendship, wherever its beginning bud sprouted, destine ...