Thank you for giving me an opportunity to recollect my unforgettable three days there.
I visited Pensacola in early March 2014. From the moment we were greeted by Gulf Coast Diplomacy at the airport, everything in Pensacola was fantastic to me.
My most cherished memory is when I was conferred an honorary citizenship of Pensacola. It was so great an honor to me that I proudly remarked it in my CV ever since. Our guided walking tour in the downtown showed the resilience and the robustness of the people in Pensacola that had made the city successfully rise up from the Deep Water Horizon disaster. I still cannot forget the taste of grits I had in the Fish House restaurant. I thought I could have the same grit later in other places then, but after visiting many other cities in America now I know I was wrong.
I stayed in Northern Virginia with my family for a year from 2017 to 2018. I was keen to revisit Pensacola, but sadly I couldn’t. Still, I do hope I will be in the places like Fort Pickens, Perdido Beach, AL, and the beautiful white sand beach again someday.
Ho-Mu LEE, Ph. D.
Senior Research Fellow
Korea Energy Economics Institute (KEEI)
