Happy New Year

As some of may very well know, it is the Lunar New Year's in Korea. Some of you may also know it as Chinese New Year. It just so happens to be the Year of the Pig, so I think all of us fat foreigners over here should rejoice in our people getting a whole year dedicated to us. Koreans don't celebrate New Year's quite the same way we do! We rang in the new year at one of our favorite little watering holes and did the countdown and everything, and we were the only people in the place. Apparently, Koreans celebrate the new year at home with...their family. Weird!

Another crazy Koreanism is that the holiday is always 3 days long, but this year the holiday fell on a Saturday, Sunday, Monday. You would think that the government would give the Thursday and Friday off, but Koreans ( myself included ) only received Monday off. So John and I had originally decided to go to Beijing this long weekend, but the tours were all sold out. I guess there was something going on there this weekend. Well, we didn't want to waste our lengthy holiday so we decided to just pick a random Korean city and just go...no plans made. We decided on the one big city we had both never been to and ended up taking a little trip to Daejon yesterday.

We took the bus to Daejon and got off at around 3pm. The first place we were told to go and check out was the Expo Park. Apparently Daejon was awarde the Expo in 1993. Well, it was a huge call and turned out to be one of the coolest days I've had in Korea thus far! We took a cab to the park and the first thing we saw was a huge square with people doing all sorts of activities. The first thing that caught my eye: a bunch of people roller-blading. We decided to rent a pair for an hour. It turned out to be the most facilitating of sight-seeing decision I've ever made. We got to see the whole park in about an hour and a half when it would have taken us a whole day on foot.

We saw the Expo observation tower (and went up of course), an amusement park, a science expo, a couple of ampitheatres and some crazy Koreans figure skating on roller blades. It was an amazing sight-seeing. We then walked downtown and it was like a ghost town. Not many Koreans and we did not see one foreigner all day. Since my first couple of weeks in Daegu, I think this was the first time I had gone a whole day without seeing other foreigners.

Anyways, I came back to Cheonan and celebrated New Year's night with a bunch of 22 year old teachers that I had never met before at the night club outside of my apartment. All in all, a great New Year's holiday. To be honest though, I'll take our New Year's celebrations any day!