the daehee lee

When I was an undergrad college student, I clipped and saved this comic strip ’cause it made me think of my baby brother and his (sometimes annoying) obsession with his favorite t.v. show:

Ooh-whee. This one would reduce me to giggles everytime I glanced at it such was the accuracy of the sibling relationship.
This past weekend, m and I drove over to the desert to visit daehee at his college out in Riverside. Oh the memories it brought up…

We learned the following things:

• (Yes, jenn) they do still stack their furniture on top of other furniture.
  
• UCR’s newer dorm halls look an awful lot like UCSC’s buildings:
  
• RA’s still make fun signs for the common area. Note that here, my brother is known as “the dae hee lee.”
  
  In the downstairs lounge area, the walls were littered with lots of helpful handmade signs that suggested students study every night, not wait till the last minute, and try to keep their GPA’s above 2.0 (or they would be considered under academic probation).
• I don’t know about you, but that outside lawn area looks awfully empty without a few sunbathers and jugglers hanging out on it.
  
  In conversation, we learned that this dorm hall is made up of mostly engineering students and they tend to stay holed up in their rooms playing video games when they weren’t diligently studying for classes. Also, the only ladies that they seem to know are the two female engineering students that live in their hall. Figures.

After the tour, we took the dae to lunch downtown. Downtown Riverside is surprisingly pretty. Lots of older buildings that look stately and mission-like. We settled on The Old Spaghetti Factory for our lunch. I just want to note that the rest of the buildings in downtown Riverside look like the building of the restaurant, but much prettier. Walking past the Mission Inn, I couldn’t help but think what a lovely location it would be for a wedding. It was that kind of pretty.

We waited for our table in their cool lobby. When I was a kid, I think I wanted to decorate my room like this. Kind of like a cross between a Victorian parlour and a dance hall saloon (so little difference in terms of decor, if you ask me).

I like this photo of me and the dae.

The dae’s so grown up now. I think going away for college has been a really good experience for him. He seems so mature! And being on his own (or as much as you can be on your own as a university student) and meeting lots of new and different people have opened him up a lot. He’s open minded about trying out new things. Case in point: he ate salad. Almost his whole life, this kid wouldn’t touch vegetables. Hated ‘em. And now he’s eating salad. Or at least he tried one once and unfortunately he had bad salad that was on its way out and so it was not the best experience. But he TRIED. That is pretty amazing in and of itself.

After lunch we walked around downtown a little more. It was so hot, we didn’t stroll for too long before we headed back to the car and drove back up to campus. We hung out on the lawn outside of the dae’s dorm for a bit. (Note the bag of leftovers that the dae wanted to take back to the dorm.)

We talked some more learning about his life at college, sharing laundry advice (it was solicited by him, not forced upon by us), wanting to stay longer, but worried about that damned traffic for our drive back home. The dae had homework to do and m and I wanted to head back so we said our goodbyes and took off. It was a lovely visit.