Best Actress

And the award goes to... Keira Knightley!

(spoiler alert for the movie Begin Again)

We were watching the movie Begin Again, and in one scene Adam Levine's musician character had just returned from a trip that included recording a new love song. He began to play it for his girlfriend, Keira Knightley's character.

As we listened along with the characters, I was struck by the emotion in Keira's face. Without her character saying a word, and conveyed through her facial expression alone, I said out loud that there was no way that the song was her.

A mere moment later... slap! Right across Adam's character's face.

In a recent scene, we had been introduced to Adam's character's producers and their very attractive female assistant. It turns out that this assistant had also gone on this trip, and Adam's character cheated on his girlfriend with her.

So, as this new love song played, Keira's face showed the realization that her boyfriend was thinking of someone else. We were extremely impressed and, after the movie concluded, this was our first topic of conversation.

Imperfect Landmarks

The first time I walked down the random side streets of urban South Korea, my group realized that we needed a landmark in order to navigate back to our starting point. The sun had already set, and one landmark seemed to be the obvious choice. Nearby, we saw a church with a glowing, bright red cross on top. We assumed that we should be able to see that light from several blocks away, and therefore easily navigate backwards at the end of our evening.

It turns out, however, that churches are everywhere. And all of them have a glowing, bright red cross on top. Therefore, after walking several blocks and turning several corners, we looked around and saw multiple instances of what we had previously thought was the perfect landmark.

We were lost.

Over time I heard this exact same anecdote from multiple people, none of whom had been in my group that evening. It turns out that these glowing, bright red crosses are the imperfect landmark of choice for new arrivals. So if you travel to South Korea for the first time, my advice is to choose another landmark.

NOT made in Taiwan

An American was working in Korea. While visiting Taiwan, he went shopping for authentic Taiwanese souvenirs to give as gifts to Korean friends. Many products in America have "made in Taiwan" labels, so this should be fairly easy, right?

At the first location he noticed a display of jewelry trinkets. These would have been perfect to buy inexpensively in large numbers. As the pile of selected items grew, he finally noticed that one of them, ironically, had a "made in Korea" label. So he began checking all of the items, in fact the entire display, and every single item had a "made in Korea" label.

So, even though America has a plethora of "made in Taiwan" products, finding any such products while actually in Taiwan proved surprisingly difficult. And importing Korean products into Korea via Taiwan seemed to violate the spirit of giving Taiwanese souvenirs as gifts. It ended up taking several days, in fact, to actually buy souvenirs purportedly made in Taiwan.