Entries about new

Happy Lunar New Year everyone!

Today is the first day of the Year of the Dragon in the Lunar calendar. Lunar New Year is a bigger deal in Korea than our 'regular' new year, but it's not celebrated very loudly. In fact, the holiday mostly consists of seeing relatives that live far away and eating certain kinds of traditional food, so there wasn't that much going on in Seoul.
Actually, Seoul was creepily empty the past few days. Because no one actually lives in Seoul (everyone just like works/studies/shops there) all the people who are usually here are now visiting their family in different parts of the country. It was so weird to see the otherwise so busy subways and 6 lane streets almost completely bare.

There was some stuff going on to entertain the foreigners and the few people left behind though, and we played a traditional new years game called Yut Nori at the guesthouse.

새해 복 많이 받으세요!

So for the first time in my life I actually went to see a major event at Newyears instead of just staying at home and watching a major event on the television.

Every Newyear, the Joseon Dynasty bell called Bosingak is rung 33 times to usher in the new year.
GaHui told me she usually watches this ceremony on tv, so it sounded like a great place to go for real tonight.





Here's the videos I made of the madness:

[The countdown]

[Fireworks]

[Concert]

The party afterwards was rather disappointing, since most Koreans give up around 00:30 and by 1:00 the streets were mostly empty. I know Hongdae, the area where I usually stay at my guesthouse, would be full of people until deep into the next afternoon, but the rest of Seoul was fricking dead. I was very surprised. We had to make our subway to the jimjilbang though, so we couldn't go back to Hongdae.
It was amazing to be in a strange country at an event as big as this one for Newyears though, I don't think I will be doing something like this very soon again.





[Korean Police are the coolest. They arrested one of the CLUBBIN' FUCK YEAH BEER AND PUSSY WHOOHOO guys in my guesthouse 'for his own good' and took pictures with whoever wanted to. This guy laughed hard when I wished him a Happy Newyear after taking the picture.]

It's 18:20 in Korea right now, and I will be going to dinner soon and then go out to see the Bell drop together with tens of thousands of Koreans, so I will wish you all a Happy Newyear right now!