Seollal

The Lunar New Year vacation starts today.  So being good family, we go visiting.

We took a 3 hour train ride from Seoul to Gumi at 7:40 this morning.  The mother-in-law (JangMoNim) lives near Gumi, out in the ‘country’ about 30 minutes from downtown.
We left early to avoid the rush.
I’ve heard many staggering statistics regarding the movement of people during the important seasonal celebrations Seollal and Chuseok.  According to today’s Korea Herald, 6.7 million people are travelling each day of the vacation period. In a country as small as South Korea, the results of this should be self-evident. Not a time you want to be travelling on a bus…

We’ll eat good food, I’ll drink with uncle and brother-in-law and I return to Seoul on Saturday. The wife is staying a little longer.

So, I’m not an intellectual…

I’ve been in Korea a while now, reading Korean blogs by various people such as The Metropolitician, The Joshing Gnome and Brian in Jeollanam-do to name a few.
In reading about the experiences and opinions of these people, I find myself agreeing, disagreeing, having shared or dissimilar experiences. As one might expect. The thing I do admire about these people is their ability to express their experiences and opinions in a way that is concise and can be clearly understood.  I wish I had that ability.  Or rather, it would be nice to have it in spades as they seem to.

Keep it up guys.

Happy Birthday Ophelia!!!

Today (as I post this, Feb 6th in NZ) is the birthday of daughter number 3, Ophelia. She turns 12 years old today.

Ophelia… HyunYoung and I hope you have a wonderful day!! You deserve it. I am so very proud of you and we hope your first year at Intermediate School is a happy one.
I Love you so much and I am a very lucky Dad.

Actually, Ophelia is very lucky too, her birthday is on Waitangi Day in New Zealand – our “National Day”. Consequently, she never has to go to school or work on her birthday. Ever. How cool is that??

I didn’t win… again.

I’m a member of the Flickr group Seoul Photo Club*. It’s a group exclusively for photos taken in Korea. Each week we have a photo challenge – the moderator selects a topic and we enter appropriate photos. This weeks topic was B&W (black and white) Open.

I didn’t win. Which is disappointing. However that’s tempered by the fact that the entries for these challenges are of a very high quality. The winner gets published in the Korea Herald, one of the English language newspapers here in Korea. I’ll get there eventually. Next week: Children and Students.

Previous winners here*.
My Photo Challenge entries here.
*must be signed in to Flickr to view

And so it begins…

So, I’ve finally decided to start a blog. I’m not sure how this will work out, but we’ll see. I guess for the next few days I’ll just ramble about things that are important to me and what’s happening at the time and stuff…