Lunar New Year Weekend

The three day Lunar New Year holiday started on Thursday this week so we had a nice four day weekend!  The best part about the Lunar New Year in Seoul is that almost everyone leaves because it's a very important traditional holiday in Korea.  Everyone travels to their hometown in the countryside so Seoul was literally almost like a ghost town for the last few days.  We spent Thursday with two of our friends hanging out at our house and then going to Itaewon, the popular foreigner area of Seoul, for dinner.  Just about everything is closed during the holiday but we thought Itaewon would be a good choice for dinner since foreigners all had the day off and probably spent it there so things would be open.  Well it was true that most restaurants were open, but there weren't many people there.  We had dinner and then, since it wasn't busy, stayed at the restaurant for another couple of hours playing Apples to Apples (the Korean waiters and waitresses were all quite intrigued).  As we were walking the streets later that night it just felt rather eerie being out with only a handful of other people on streets that are normally so packed it's hard to walk, especially at that time of night.  But we enjoyed having the subway car to ourselves on the way home. 

On Friday Eric went to the PC bang to play computer games and I went to Gangnam with two friends again.  We saw Frozen, which was simply wonderful and a nice surprise that you can find an animated movie not dubbed over in Korean.  Of course we chose seats that were right smack in the middle of the theater and had a few times where we were the only ones laughing loudly and hysterically...  Gangnam is another area that I really hate to go to very often because of how insanely busy it always is, anytime of day.  However, on Friday it was great!!  After the movie we went shopping and had most of the stores all to ourselves.  We also went to a dog cafe.  Cat cafes are quite popular here, I went to one a while back, but dog cafes are a bit harder to find.  We ordered our drinks and then just sat at a table and the little dogs would often come over and try to jump in our laps (they were too little though so we had to help them).  I was hoping they would have some bigger dogs to play with, but they were just little ones.  Most of them were quite cute and fluffy though.  Of course they were all wearing clothes, one was even wearing a hanbok (traditional Korean clothes) for the holiday!

Saturday evening I had dinner with a group of friends at a Vietnamese restaurant.  Saturday also marked the one month mark for us.  We are officially down to less than one month, four weeks, that we have left in Korea.  Being able to spend three days with friends was the best way to spend the long weekend, especially since our weekends are becoming more limited all the time.  Tomorrow I go back to my regular schedule at work for two weeks before it's my last day.  Eric has three weeks and a couple days left at his many jobs.  January seems to have evaporated, I can only guess February will do the same.

 Dog Cafe

 A Vietnamese feast

 

This is what the subway looked like all weekend... It was weird!