Lunar New Year (Chinese New Year) is a time when families leave the city to go visit their Grandparents. Many foreigners go on a vacation, but for those of us left behind, we had to get creative.
The first night, I decided since everyone else was on a vacation, I would go to a hotel for a night. All I really wanted was a bathtub. Yes, I realize I paid way to much for a good soak...
Apparently this hotel has problems with furniture being stolen. I brought my wireless router to use my laptop, thinking I'd be pretty tech savvy. Wrong. I went to move the (very heavy) solid desk to get to the computer jack and the sirens went off! In a scurry, I tried to move the desk back, but nothing was turning off this loud siren! Finally, after a good shove of the desk back to the wall, the alarm stopped, just in time for a knock at my door. The alarm had notified the staff downstairs that I was trying to "steal the furniture"! I sheepishly opened the door, holding the computer cord, trying to explain that I'm not really a thief. Thankfully he helped me fix up the wireless router and got everything going....even though I could have done it by myself! :)
Everything was closed on Monday, the actual holiday, so there was nothing to do in Seoul. Everland, the amusement part outside the city opened especially for foreigners like us, who also had nothing to do. What better way to spend Lunar New Year than at the amusement park!? It was 8 degrees when we left in the morning and we just about froze solid throughout the day, but it was really fun.
We went to three shows. The first was a dancing character show, in which the huge frog was entirely too into it! We could not stop laughing... The next was a circus with acrobats and Chinese dragons. The third was a show with sea lions doing water tricks.
We went through a safari in "Africa," yet shivering the whole way. We saw lions, tigers and bears. The bears performed tricks right up next to our safari bus. I'd never seen a bear walk on it's hind legs before!
We went through the Korean version of the "It's a small world" ride at Disney. Each country had a section that showed it's landscape, traditional clothes and culture. The Korean dolls were wearing hanbok and carrying fans. The African country's dolls wore tribal clothes in the jungle, the German dolls wore lederhosen and were yodeling...and the American section was a football field of players and cheerleaders. How incredibly sad! That's pretty embarrassing that we have no traditional clothes and our culture is football.
In between rides, we were asked by many people to take a picture with them. Philippino people, Myanmar people and Chinese people, all wanted a Caucasian in their picture. We never saw any other Americans, until we boarded the bus to go home.
One attraction in the park was sledding. Surprisingly, sledding in Korea is much different than in America! After we were given a sled, we were hooked onto a tow rope type thing, to slide us up the hill. Why has this invention not made it to America yet?! This takes away the only bad part of sledding, climbing up the hill :) At the top, we sat down on the sled at gates! There was an announcer who pushed a button to open the gates, so that everyone would go down at the same time. A little too organized for me :)
We were hoping to find caramel corn on the way out of the park. Turns out all of the booths for snacks had already closed, except for one. We jogged over to the last booth to join the 20 person long line, until we figured out what they were selling. Peanut butter fried squid. After a good long laugh, we passed on the squid, waited for the bus for 30 minutes in the freezing cold and headed back to Seoul.
All in all, a fantastic Lunar New Year!
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