Yongsan Garrison and Seoul Lantern Festival

This weekend was a busier one!  On Saturday morning one of my former kindergarten students stopped by our house because his mom had prepared some Korean meat, bulgogi and daeji kalbi, to give us along with some rice and fruit.  It is so nice that they still think about us and I'm really looking forward to meeting them for dinner another time or two before we leave.

I also met a friend for lunch on Saturday at the U.S. Army Yongsan Garrison base.  Eric and I have always wanted to go on the base to see what's it like but, of course, you have to have someone with those privileges sign you in as a guest.  A friend I met through some other friends a couple months ago works on the base so she and her family took me to a restaurant on the base.  I was excited to eat American food for American prices!  The base was really interesting to see also.  It's so huge that I only saw a very small part of it driving around with them.  There's no skyscrapers or high rise apartment buildings and it's so quiet.  The schools are huge as the elementary school has 1100 students.  There's very little traffic and few pedestrians.  It was fun to see!  I wish I could have gone to the commissary too but no guests are allowed in there...

Saturday evening Eric and I met up near the Seoul City Hall area to go to the Seoul Lantern Festival.  I went to this same festival last year with a friend.  It's a really nice festival with lanterns along Cheonggycheon, a stream that runs through the middle of the city.  I think almost all ten million Seoul residents were there walking along the stream, which is below the main street, so we decided to walk above it and look down.  This way we could take much better pictures and take our time with our space.  We had some dalkgalbi (spicy chicken and vegetables) for dinner which was very yummy.

On Sunday I had to spend part of the day completing the last big assignment I have to do for my online graduate class and for dinner Eric BBQ'd some of that meat we were given.  It was very good!!  The weather is getting cold but not unbearable yet.  It gets below freezing at night and in the morning but our house is still comfortable, though Eric did pull the space heater out of the dusty corner last weekend.  But we've only used it for ourselves once or twice and Friday night I used to help dry the clothes that still weren't dry after 24 hours.  Soon we will be taking a Costco bag full of wet clothes to the laundromat dryer every weekend since the clothes just won't dry in our house with the windows closed.

A nice view from our roof while BBQ-ing tonight