Sunday, February 18, 2007

Happy Lunar New Year!

I forgot to mention that this is a long weekend...Lunar New Year! (Also called Chinese New Year back home). Everyone and their dog jumped into their cars and sat in traffic jams for at least 2 days to go visit their grandparents in the country. It's made driving on main highways impossible, particularly near Seoul, but made my city a bit of a ghost town. Everything shut down, which is really strange here where nothing normally closes early (some restaurants stay open all night) and the lights stay on nearly all the time. This morning I was wandering about in search of an open restaurant or food store of any kind and bumped into a fellow westerner doing the same...we were pretty much the only people on the sidewalk. Neither of us had much in our apartments by the way of food, being so accustomed as we are to eating out around here. Funny!

Oh, and this is the year of the Golden Pig (or Golden Boar if you want to sound a bit more refined). As soon as you arrive in Korea, you notice hundreds of these exceedingly tacky golden plastic piggy banks for sale on every street corner: (Disclaimer: I borrowed this image from the Internet somewheres...it's not mine)
Apparently this year of the Golden Pig comes about only once every six centuries and is thought to bring about good luck and prosperity.

So, Happy New Year from Asia!

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