Happy Year of the Pig/Boar

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Sue was in town this past week so we spent a bit of time wandering about. I'll try to get all of the pictures blogged up over the next few days.

This last sunday was the lunar new year (a.k.a. "Chinese New Year"). We now enter the year of the pig, or sometimes called the boar. Or for the carnivores, the year of pork. Mmm...

So, some new year's related pictures:


We saw this display in Insadong. It was a whole flight of stairs filled with an assortment of pigs. There were a couple of funny ones, like a pig with antlers, and another pig with a tiger's tail. It was a funny sight.



At New Year's time, many people give gifts to each other. The folks at KU were very nice and gave us each a box of traditional Korean sweets. This box was very ornately presented, and there's actually a second layer of goodies underneath what you see in the picture above. I probably can't eat all of them before they start to go stale (I gave out a few in class today).



To get an idea of what lengths some people go to, here's a gift box of fish... that costs 500,000W. That's over $500USD!!! How could a box of dried fish cost so much? I'm told that these are special native Korean fish, hand raised in some sort of hollowed-out bamboo container.



We also found this neat little area that had one statue for each of the 12 symbols of the eastern zodiac. The close up is of this year's celebrity.