Coco Busan started as a little idea in my mind 2.5 years ago in Edmonton, Alberta, when I decided to leave Canada on my own and venture to Korea. Once I published my first post (and received comments in a matter of minutes), I realized the power of connecting instantly to people through my writing.  In the two years I lived in Korea, this blog has been both an anchor to and expression of my creat ...

Last weekend, my students graduated kindergarten–a two-hour ceremony that featured caps and gowns, song and dance acts, and a re-imagined version of The Blind Men and the Elephant, for which I constructed a miniature elephant from cardboard, felt, and packing tape–the same tape I used to seal up the three boxes I shipped home to Canada.

These are a few…

Coco Busan friends, readers, all my peeps out there…yes, it’s creeping to the end of February and I travelled to the Philippines in December and I’m still posting about it. Yes, I’ve been back in Korea for almost two months, and have been living life here as well.  But I’ve got a thing about chronology.  And following a storyline through to the end.  It may be a mi ...

Called “Island of Fire” by the Spaniards who docked on its shores in 1565, Siquijor is known for mystical healers, relaxed villages, quiet beaches, and–hence its Spanish nickname–fireflies.  Though government-posted signs declare that, despite a prominent folklore presence, witchcraft-practicing healers don’t exist on Siquijor, one friendly born-and-raised local man ...

A little hut… ***

From Bohol, we sailed to Siquijor…

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 ...