The Lunar New Year

So here I am, sitting on the subway, trying to decide what the rest of my weekend is going to look like. The last full week of intensives is finished and we've got a four-day weekend to recover before we have to go back to school for a short week.

This weekend is the lunar new year, or the Chinese new year as we were used to hearing about it back in Canada. It's not at all the same kind of celebration in korea that it is in china, but it is still one if the most important holidays on the Korean calendar.

There are lots of other places that explain it better than I can, so I'll just give the basics: Koreans reckon their birthdays by the lunar calendar, so the lunar new year is essentially everyone's birthday. As such, the new year is cause for what amounts to an annual family reunion. Everyone vacates the cities and travels to the hometown of their oldest living relative (which makes traveling to, say, Seoul for fun all but impossible...But more on that later), where families have a number of traditions that they carry out. These traditions range from kids wearing traditional Korean outfits bought specially for the occasion to everyone eating a special soup that signifies your growing one year older.

The other big excitment from the weekend was the fact that I was finally able to get myselfva guitar, and Shan and I are now set to join the worship team at our church starting next weekend. I think I'm mist excited about this because it's been since June that I was last on a worship team and not just playing for myself. When Shan and I got home from shopping yesterday, I played so much that I actually blistered my fingers for the first time ever since starting to play (that's just how long it's been since I left my guitars in Tim's care back in Canada)!

I think our plans for the rest of the weekend will include much sleep and hopefully some geocaching tomorrow, if the weather stays nice. I've still got a couple travel bugs that I have to get placed before their owners start to worry. (For those unfamiliar with geocaching check out their website, http://www.geocaching.com/ and feel free to join in the hunt. All you need is a gps and a sense I'd adventure!)

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]