…but tasty!
Fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon; today we walked across the street from our apartment to a brand new place that does steak Korean-style.
I’m about as proficient in metrics as I am in Korean, but loosely translated the sign says you get a lot of beef for W39,000…
And as you can see the sign did not lie…
Because it is so expensive we rarely indulge ourselves with beef during our stays in Korea. Don’t really miss it too much because I love me them pork dishes– especially daeji galbi and samgyapsal. But on special occasions, like meeting the esteemed Kevin Kim or celebrating Jee Yeun’s sister’s birthday, we can splurge for the cow. Now Tabom Brazil is all the meat you can eat for around W30,000 a head. And at the place pictured above (name escapes me at the moment) we got more meat than we could eat for W45,000 (they add W2000 per person for the side dishes). Jee Yeun liked the Korean style better than Brazil (surprise, surprise) and I’ll just say I like both apples and oranges.
In other news, I had my consult with Dr. Yoo yesterday where we discussed the findings from my recent comprehensive physical exam.
If I understood Dr. Yoo correctly somewhere there’s an 80 year old man without a liver…
Actually, my liver is fat but otherwise healthy. The best news was my lungs, colon, and prostrate are doing fine. The stomach thing wasn’t cancer either. So I need to continue waging the battle of the bulge through diet and exercise. And take some pills.
Breakfast of Champions!
Lots of pills. Which I guess are supposed to keep the cholesterol low so the 50% blockage in one heart artery doesn’t progress any further. Don’t want my sweet old heart attacking me any time soon, that’s for sure.
Life is good.
“Fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon; today we walked…”
Now I am pretty certain that the above is improperly punctuated. I tried it with a comma and I tried without. Neither felt right. So, when in doubt I always take the middle ground and use a semi-colon. I should have just re-wrote the sentence in a less convoluted fashion but where’s the fun it that?
For what it’s worth, I think your sentence is punctuated fine, as long as it’s interpreted charitably.
A semicolon normally separates two independent clauses. You had written:
Fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon; today we walked across the street from our apartment to a brand new place that does steak Korean-style.
If I charitably assume you’re writing in a terse “journal” style that omits subjects, then the semicolon makes sense. What I mean by a “journal” style is something like this:
Got up today. Ate breakfast. Watched some TV. Looking forward to tonight.
—the kind of thing you might find in a journal. The above locutions are all independent clauses (i.e., they can all stand alone), as can be seen when I rewrite them more fully:
I got up today. I ate breakfast. I watched some TV. I’m looking forward to tonight.
By the same token, I could rewrite your sentence as:
We’re fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon; today we walked across the street from our apartment to a brand new place that does steak Korean-style.
A bit stilted, but serviceable. If I were to correct anything, I might insert a comma after “today” and a hyphen between “brand” and “new” (we normally hyphenate phrasal adjectives); I’d also write “steakhouse” as a single compound, but that’d be about it.
To avoid any dangling-modifier issues, though, I could rewrite your sentence this way:
Fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon, we walked, this afternoon, across the street from our apartment to a brand-new place that does steak Korean-style.
The “Fresh off…” phrase now operates more clearly as a modifier instead of as a clause, which justifies switching out the semicolon for a comma. I eliminate the adverb-placement problem with “today” by using a parenthetical expression (i.e., set off by commas on either side, with the commas acting like parentheses), “this afternoon.”
But an even better revision that might take care of the “today” placement problem would be the following:
Today, fresh off Sunday’s adventure in dining at the Brazilian steak house in Itaewon, we walked across the street from our apartment to a brand-new place that does steak Korean-style.
The above may be the most robust revision because “Today” is a strong way to start any sentence. It grabs the reader’s attention and implies immediacy, which makes whatever you’re about to tell us even more compelling.
My take, anyway.
Yeah, that all makes sense. That sentence wouldn’t have survived if I was writing for anything other than LTG. And blogging is definitely compatible with the journal style you mention. The last version you shared is definitely the most consistent with what I was trying to convey.
Thanks for the tips!
Whoops—I’m a bad editor: I failed to fuse “steak” and “house” in my “final draft” of your sentence. Doesn’t bode well for tomorrow’s editing test.
If quizzes make you quizzical, then tests make you…?
Balls…I mean testy…