07 February 2008

새해복 많이 받으세요! (happy new year)

the seongsan ilchulbong crater (성산 일출봉) on jeju island's east coast is a popular place to watch the new year's first sunrise.

today marks day 1 of the korean lunisolar calendar. although korea officially adopted the gregorian calendar in 1895, traditional holidays are still celebrated, and seollal (설날) is the most important. i think today is year 4340 on the rarely-used dangi (단기) calendar, which is based on the 1/4-bear 3/4-man, dangun wanggeom's (단군왕검), 2333 bce founding of korea.

anyhow, happy new year!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey man - Great blog. I am really impressed and I enjoyed reading through it. It was great to read an english blog not written by some expat english teacher but a real korean :) I have been to Korea once and would love to be back there soon. I live in Boston and know Cambridge like the back of my hand so maybe we can grab a drink when you are in town for the lecture.....

matt said...

thanks for the comment. i don't think i qualify as a "real korean". that said, i have noticed that most white western expats have a love/hate (more the latter) reaction to korea . i, on the other hand, have a totally biased, irrational affection for my mudder's mudderland.

re: the drink offer, i enjoy meeting strangers in strange places. if u read this, please send me your contact info. better yet, leme know if u have a blog.

Anonymous said...

Just got back from some korean-chinese in cambridge.... Great fried chicken.

Good to hear from you! I will shortly forward my contact info to the email ID in your blog profile. Unfortunately I never started a blog but should one of these days. Would be great to meet up/chat before you head back to Korea. Just remembered seeing "gaspanic" a bar in tokyo somewhere on your blog - can't believe I ended up at the same place when I was there!

Jonith said...

where is the post about seoul's 600 year-old historic gate burning down? i found that so sad -- cnn showed the people breaking down in the street crying as they watched this piece of history burn... i don't normally choke up on the treadmill watching cnn intl. ...

i also heard it was one of the few relics that survived the japanese invasion/bombings.

matt said...

post is finally up... i was in transit.

such a horrible tragedy. feel like i should have been there. not to put the flames out, of course, but just to be amongst the peeps.

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