Happy New Year!
Yes, Happy New Year. It is the lead up to Sollal, the Lunar New Year, here. In Asia most countries don't really celebrate the "Western" New Year. Instead, Lunar New Year is the big celebration time. Which is why I have a 5 day vacation, which started yesterday. :)
This will be the year of the Horse, the Water Horse. I am a Fire Horse myself. If you are interested in learning more about the Chinese and Korean Astrological signs check out http://www.chineseastrology.com/wu/
Yesterday I spent most of the day out with one of my students. We went to Sangdangsansong, or Sangdang Fortress. It is an old fortress on top of a mountain. I had a great time there, and we went to one of the oldest restaurants in the area for lunch. Lunch consisted of a LOT of side dishes, plus a taek-tang and a bap-tang. Taek is chicken, bap is rice, and tang is soup. If you mixed the two soups together, and took out the ginger root, it would have looked exactly like mom's home made chicken soup with rice. It ALMOST tasted as good as mom's soup too. Then we went walking around a mall back in Chongju for a while. I picked up some dirt cheap VCD's. THey were selling off stock, and they only cost 3300 WON each! So I picked up Commando and Dusk Til Dawn. When I was getting out of the car to go home Cheong-Seob, my student, gave me a Sollal gift, a Whiskey gift set. It was very nice of him, I hadn't expected anything.
Sollal is to Koreans what Christmas and New Years are to us. It is a time for family to gather and celebrate the New Year. It is also a time to remember your ancestors, and honour them. You give close friends and family members, and those you respect a gift as well. Plus, when kids shpow respect to their elders on New Years day you are supposed to rewrad them with money. They show respect by bowing and saying a nice greeting to you. Elementary age kids get 1000 won, middle school 5000, and high school 10,000. It can be an expensive day if you have a large family. While it isn't excatly the same as Christmas, that is the closest Western holiday it equates to.
I will be spending a fairly quiet Sollal in Chongju. Unfortunately for 3 days not much will be open. Odds are I will spend part of it with friends. I also have a houseguest. While one of the teachers is in China I am watching his lovebird, Bibimbap. (Yes, he named his bird after a rice dish.) It has taken Bibimbap a while to get settled, he still isn't fully comfortable with the change, but he is starting to chirp to music again. Although not enough as to annoy the hell out of me. I think that if he knew it would annoy me he would be chirping a LOT more. ;)
Is Bush STILL on drugs? Some of his comments, before and after being appointed President by his brother Jeb, and then the Supreme Court, REALLY make you wonder if he is or not. Or at the least make you wonder if he has some sort of brain damage. I, and other teachers, actually use some of his quotes from major speeches, interviews, and policy announcements in class as examples of bad grammar, and how people should NOT create words just because they can't think of a real one. But I digress.
I hope you all have a Happy Lunar New Year!
Flint
******
Ah Bush thanks to your stupidity people could mock you AND educate others at the same time. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment