Happy New Year!

There were posters around town with images of fireworks exploding above Hwaseong Fortress, so we put two and two together and decided there must be some kind of New Years' celebration going down at the wall.


Jo thought it would be a good opportunity to hand out candy to random Koreans. We each had a pocket full of little hard candies and handed them out with a cheery "Happy New Year!". Apparantly, no one ever taught Koreans to not take candy from strangers because they seemed pretty happy about our free sweets.



When we got to the fortress there was a mob of people hiking up these stairs. It's a good 10-15 minute hike, but the view of Suwon is awesome from the top. On the way up, one Korean guy handed me his cell phone and asked me to say "Happy New Year" into the phone to his friend. Ah, my english is such a novelty here.






We got to the top with about 5 minutes to spare, and we waited patiently to be overwhelmed by awesome Korean fireworks. At 12:00 the fireworks in the above video went off. We felt a little ripped off and made our way back down.

We took the opportunity to segregate ourselves by country. All the Canadians...




The Americans...



And representing the UK.... lol


Seconds after these photos were taken the sky lit up and we were treated to the New Year's fireworks we'd been waiting for. Above is a quick video. In true Korean style, the fireworks went off at about 12:15am. Koreans love "taking a rest". They are the slowest walkers you will ever race past. They go to a restaraunt and eat salad for four hours. It's a laid back mentality and who are we to demand prompt fireworks?


We capped the night off with a drink at the Beer Garten, our local haunt. Mel and I ordered a plate of chicken and the owner kind of tried to warn me that it was a spicy dish. Fearless for 2007, I ordered it anyway. Tears running down my face after my first bite I look up and the owner and his wife are laughing, giving me a total "I told you so"-look.


So we watched fireworks over a fortress wall and burned our tongues on chicken. What did you do?