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Sae hae bok manee badusaeyo! Happy Lunar New Year! We have spent the past weekend exploring the Korean holdiay of Lunar New Year. Last Thursday and Friday our parents came to school and watched us teach. Our kids also came dressed in hanbok, traditional Korean clothes. They had to bow to us, the directors, and later also to their parents. We gave them both money and a blessing. It would have been interesting to understand what each of the parents said to the kids. We also played games like Korean hopscotch, arm wrestling, and yut nori. Yut nori is a popular game, which we plan on buying, where you throw four sticks and get points to move around the board. There are ways to overtake other players and to take short cuts to win. This is a picture of Matt throwing the sticks while playing yut nori outside this past weekend.

On Saturday we traveled to the more traditional district of Seoul called Insadong. There we explored a park, window shopped some, and tried to stay warm. The windchill was below 10 degrees Fahrenheit I think. We did end up finding some hanbok that fit Matt! We had wanted to buy some but, being hand-made from silk, they are pretty expensive. This one was the only one like it, the right size, and super on sale! Now we are in search of hanbok for Eileen.

On Sunday we hoped that everyone would be with their families so we traveled to one of the ski parks near Seoul. While it was a little busy, we are guessing that it is nowhere near what it is normally like during a weekend. Eileen tried snowboarding for the first time and did pretty well. She then switched to skis later on and we had a lot of fun trying out different slopes. It was not a very big place, although some of the runs were a little longer, which was nice. The ski boots were the most simple boots we had ever seen and thought that was funny because the skis were nice shaped skis. There were a few interesting differences between our ski resorts. There were no maps for us to follow. Each chair just had labeled what kind of run was most likely on the other side. Luckily, that was also listed in English. There were mirrors at both the bottom and top of the hill so you can make sure that you still look good all the time. Once you were about to get on the ski lift, there was a little moving walkway thing that moved you until the chair came under you. We also found that they shut down the ski slopes from 5 to 6:30. To ski after 6:30 it cost a lot more money. However, we also found out that after we stopped skiing at 5 we couldn't go home until 10:30. We hung out in the "lodge" (there was no fireplace or hominess about it) and then ended up finding this large, kinda freaky, underground mall run by the ski resort.

Finally, we spent the actual day of Lunar New Year, Monday, at the Namsangol Traditional Korean Village in Seoul. Here we got to play lots of traditional games like yut nori (a board game), nurtwigi (seesaw), throwing arrows, bean bag toss, stick and hoop game, kite flying, and jaegi chagi (hacky sack). We watched a cool performance of traditional dancing and musicians. We also watched a tightrope walker. We saw traditional food being made and other traditions that go along with the holiday. We had a very fun and very cold day trying lots of Lunar New Year experiences. See our pictures to check out what else we saw. Also, below, I am going to post videos that go along with this post so that you can see all that we saw. Enjoy!