I am still alive!! Many apologies for my complete absence this last month! And a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!!
Well, I'll give you a little run-down of the holidays (ha!) in Korea. So I got back from Hong Kong in the middle of November, where it was all decorated with lights and some trees, and Christmas music was starting to come out, so I was in a bit of a festive mood. Back in Korea, no lights or music yet. But I started to get my Christmas play list ready, and thought about Christmas movies I'd like to watch, so by the first of December I was in full Christmas swing. As I'm so good at containing my excitement, some of my friends heard me raving about Christmas things, and as it turns out, a lot of people here are just as big of Christmas fans as me!! It was only fitting, then, to through a Christmas Kick-off party at the beginning of December. I had a tree that Hannah gave to me, and there were a few people leaving before Christmas, so it was awesome to get everyone together and in the spirit nice and early, like it should be!
The party was a huge success... everyone brought an ornament to put on the tree, and someone decided it would be a good idea to make gingerbread men in a toaster oven! Do you know how hard it is to A) find ingredients to bake with in Korea (the closest molasses is in Germany), B) find cookie cutters in Korea (but I actually found tiny little Christmas ones! yay!), and C) bake about 200 1.5" 12 at a time in a minuscule oven?! (If you're curious... it takes about 3 and a half hours to bake them all) But it was SO worth it... they turned out great and we had a good time decorating and eating them. I also tried my hand at home-made egg nog... tried the cooked kind, because eggs aren't refrigerated here, and I didn't want to kill anyone (puts a damper on the holiday spirit!)... I think it worked pretty well, after you skim off the scrambled eggs that tend to form. Found out that Koreans only drink coconut rum, which definitely can't be put in egg nog, so we tried some other combos... Jack Daniels (very bad!), Crown Royal (not horrible), but in the end, either plain or (believe it or not) with Bailey's turned out to be the best! And what's a Christmas party without a gag gift exchange?! The best one was the 6 cans of SPAM, and guess who got that one?! The only one there that likes SPAM ("Guys, I'm Asian, I love this stuff" I think was his response). His girlfriend, on the other hand, was not nearly as impressed, as she got SPAM feasts for a few weeks after that. She went back to Canada, I think that might be why! haha
So when you tell a Korean that you've just had your first Christmas party, and it's December 3, the look they give you is quite similar to what you'd get if you told them you want to skydive without a parachute. They thought I was completely nuts. "It's only the beginning of December" they kept repeating. "Exactly. Eat some gingerbread" was my response. The "Christmas season" here starts around December 20th, and ends on December 26. The big department store had a few decorations and lights up, and if you were lucky you'd hear "All I Want for Christmas is You" on the radio (if you were unlucky it was "Last Christmas" by George Michael) but other than that, Christmas just isn't a big deal here at all. So after the kick-off, the lead-up to the big day was pretty much non-existent, unless you count the students who were complaining that Christmas wouldn't be any good this year because they were single. For holidays, we got (ready...) December 25th. That's it. That's right, we had class on Monday the 24th. And who came?! EVERYONE!! I read The Night Before Christmas to everyone, because I refused to have real classes on Christmas eve. But everyone seemed to like it, and I think they were entertained by my enthusiasm.
But Christmas came, and on Christmas eve (at like 10:00, after everyone was done work!) there was 5 of us who had a movie marathon (Love Actually and A Christmas Story) and pizza, while I baked more gingerbreads, and then Santa came! It was really nice just to have people there when we woke up on Christmas morning, and we all opened our gifts from home and had a yummy breakfast together (at like noon). And that night, the feast! As almost half of us in our group of friends are veggie, Sarah made a Tofurkey with amazing mushroom and pecan stuffing dried cherry sauce (you can find cranberries about as easily as molasses). Broccoli and cheese sauce, sweet potato, risotto and zucchini rounded out the meal, and more desserts than is really necessary. But the evening was full of fantastic friends and lots of love, which was a real comfort. For most of us, it was our first Christmas away from home, which is tough. We all missed our families and our friends back home, and all the traditions that usually happen at Christmas. But being surrounded by good people made it a lot easier. This won't be a trend though; wherever I am next December, I will come back to Calgary for the holidays!
Winter here is a joke. I think on Christmas day it was about 10 degrees. I had a house full of people, the heat was off and all the windows were open!! But, the Saturday after Christmas, I was about to go for a run when I looked out the window, and what to my wondering eyes should appear? Miniature flakes falling from the sky!! It was snow, real, honest snow! So awesome!! So I ran in the little flurry, and by Saturday night there was actually a little layer of snow covering the ground! And on Sunday it kept snowing, and Monday too!! By the end, there was about an inch or two, not much but it's probably all we'll get this year! I was so happy, I was calling all my Canadian friends here and we all shared in the joy! David, the South African that I work with, was in awe; he got here in July and has never seen snow before!! He thought it was ash in the air from a fire at first! He's having a tough time with the "cold" but enjoys the white stuff too. I keep telling him that's what makes winter bearable! It kind of made everything seem festive again... as I said, by the end of Boxing day, any hint that Christmas had happened had vanished.
New Years in Korea is an experience I'll never forget! Once again, not as big of a holiday as it is back home, so I still had to work on the 31st. But after class, I raced to the train and went to Busan, a city down on the south east coast. My friends were there on the beach, and I was actually in the subway at midnight, but evidently it didn't really matter... nothing happened anywhere. The beach was fun though, there were lots of people and lights, people were shooting off fireworks and there were big drum circles and music and dancing, so we had a great time there for a while. Then we went to a foreigner bar, because you need to do something to A) warm up after being on the beach on December 31 (no snow, but frigid winds) and B) stay awake for the finale. The finale, the thing that gets Koreans going on New Years, isn't the countdown to midnight, it's sunrise the next morning. So at 6:30, pumped full of lattes and triangle kimbab, we trudged back to the beach with thousands of other people to watch the first sunrise of 2008! What an amazing time!! There was a GIANT Buddha head carved into the sand, and people were lighting wish candles and placing them all around it. You could also write a New Years wish on a balloon, and just before the sun poked through they let them all go, so there were hundreds of balloons in the air. There were also lots of fishing boats going back and forth along the shore, and helicopters flew over the crowd and dropped confetti. There were polar bear swimmers, and you have to give these guys credit. Canadian polar bear-ers may run into water that the ice has been chipped off of, but these guys ran in to the ocean, swam out 200m and the treaded water until the sun came out!!! They were probably in there for about 45 minutes by the time they made it back to shore! But we sat on the beach all huddled together and waited as the sky went from dark red to orange and pink and yellow, and finally the first rays came through, and then the sun itself, and everyone was cheering and happy and calling Happy New Year all around ("Happy New Year" in Korean is really long... I tried really hard to remember it but failed miserably). Probably one of the coolest New Years memories I've had. Then there was the bit where we tried to catch a train with 500 000 other people (failed miserably at that too) but we managed to get in a cab, arrived back at the hostel at 9 and had to check out at 11... thank goodness for sleeping rooms at the jimjilbang (bath house. And you're not naked for that bit, you've got "spa clothes").
So that pretty much sums up my December! I spent half the month getting pumped up for Christmas and the other half wishing I was at home for Christmas. But I survived the holidays away from home, and not a day went by that I didn't miss everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful time as well, and that the new year is full of joy and hope and happiness! All the best!
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