Lunar New Year

It's our first weekend in Chuncheon. The local shops are closed down and the pig restaurant that we live above have put up their notice that they won't be open this weekend. Why? It's the lunar New Year. A lot of families took off Friday for Seoul to visit with friends and grandparents. Our school is closed on Monday, so we have a long weekend. So what are we doing for the holiday?

Myeongdong

Saturday afternoon we took a taxi to the shopping district of Chuncheon. The teacher we are replacing showed us around and took us out to eat at the Grazie. It's an italian bistro type place where we all ordered Pane, a bread bowl with spaghetti in a creamy white sauce. It was very rich, which made me a little queasy but made Michael feel "amazing." We will probably come back to that place eventually, but our eyes were opened to the culinary world of Chuncheon.

We saw several places that we will have to hit up, including a pizza place and a waffle cafe. Funny thing, McDonalds delivers here. Hopefully we can learn how to order when we get cellphones, because everyone delivers and they can detect our address from the phone when we call.

We caught a quick glimpse of the market here, Central Market. We saw a lot of fish and some pigs feet. There were some vendors selling fried things that smelled delicious, but we had just eaten so we didn't want to get anything. We will definitely be back to this area when it warms up a little (It was about 25F and snowing).

CGV

Last night we decided to see a movie so we went off to CGV. The movie theatre near us occupies a 12 floor building. It took a little bit of trial and error to figure out where everything was in the building. The lobby and ticket box are on the 3rd floor. Koreans love using the queue system where you take a number. So we took a number and when it was called we talked to the person at the desk. She was very helpful and picked out great seats for us.

Finding the theatre is a bit difficult. With the help of the ticket taker, we figured out or movie was in theatre 7. Movie theatres here have assigned seats, so we found our seats and sat down just in time. The movie we saw was The Wolfman. Not a very good movie, but it was nice to have the movie experience. We were happy to find that they sell popcorn and coke zero for pretty decent prices. We will definitely be back when there are better movie options.

Today was grocery day. We've been to the big stores, E-Mart and GS Mart, but we went to an actual grocery store today, Nong Hyup. We were crazy and walked the whole way there (about a mile) and back with arms full of groceries. Happily, we now have a stocked fridge :)

This afternoon we picked up our "goodies" from the other foreign teacher at our school. We bought his TV and stand as well as some other miscellaneous things in his apartment. Some of the stuff we have now, and some we will pick up before he leaves.

Our first load of laundry is still drying, but much faster thanks to our new drying rack.

Tonight we are just watching some DVDs on our new tv and relaxing. We start back at school on Tuesday! I'll leave you with some pictures of Gizmo, which I am sure everyone wants to see :)