The Year of the Rat begins

Lunar New Year, 'Sol-nal', as it's called in Korean, is a national holiday here. As such, we, along with 48,000,000 other people here, had a sweet 3 day holiday.

Holly and I headed up to Seoul for the holiday, and met up with a number of different people while we were there, including Ben and Jade (from Ulsan). We spent a lot of great time with them. We checked out the markets and visited the national art gallerey to see an amazing Van Gogh exhibit.

We also visited with my neighbour from La Ronge, Anne-Marie Kidd, who has lived in Seoul for over 2 years. We met up with her and went to nearby Suwon, where an ancient fortress still stands within the city.

Then we met up with Holly's 2nd cousin Colleen, and her husband Bruce. They had lived in a southern community of Korea and were in Seoul for a course prior to moving back to Nelson, BC. They were really great people and we look forward to seeing them again sometime down the road.

Next stop was Bukhansan National Park, where Holly and I hiked up a little mountain and had a view of northern Seoul (see the picture of apartments below). It was a crazy sight. I think there were probably more people living in the apartments within that photo than there are in lovely old Saskatchewan. That realization blew my hair back (not that that's difficult... there's less and less to blow back every day).

At the base of the park we found an outdoor bouldering wall and had a session on it, that was fun, but the highlight was seeing Spooky's (Holly's fat old cat) oriental cousin rooting through the compost nextdoor to the climbing wall. This raggedy old cat ran away with a slab of meat about a third his size after I took the picture. Cats in Horea, by the way, are not pets. Much to Holly's dissapointment, the cats are all quite wild, dirty, mean and unfriendly.

Anyway this is all I can write for now, as we are packing the apartment up to move out. By the way, we are done our contract officially, and preparing to meet John and Samantha (Holly's bro and his girlfriend) and one of our best friends, Jeff ( a beauty from La Ronge, you might know him as the rat, or you might know him as a groomsman in our wedding party, regardless, you likely know him, he knows everybody!) in HONG KONG!!!! Yeahhhh. Holly's been rocking to 'the final countdown' by Europe, every morning. We are so excited to see them, to see Hong Kong and Thailand, and eventually get home to Canada, that my hands shake with excitement writing this.

On that note Holly and I are off to see Ben and Jade. Not much time to visit our friends anymore... Later!