Goodbye 2005, Hello 06!

Happy 2006! First of all, to those who actually check this from time to time, my apologies for my lack of recent posts. Let me go back to where I left off in the last one.
My first Christmas away from my family was actually pretty good. On Christmas Eve I went to a service at my church here with my friends Susan and Qiqi. It was a little different from regular Christmas Eve services, in that although we sang and listened to Christmas songs and did the candlelight service thing, there was also a couple of classical piano/cello pieces played, a ballet dance, an acapella performance, and even a taekwondo performance (one of the guys in the church, Songkwon, is a taekwondo instructor, so it was him and his students). The only downside to the service was that Susan started feeling really sick, and could hardly walk out of there by the time it was finished. Fortunately she took some meds and was feeling better on Christmas. On Christmas day, after a service at church where by the end I found myself somehow elected to the church council, I went to this big Christmas dinner at my coworker Angela's apartment where the foreign teachers from my school and a few friends had gotten together. We ate turkey, mashed potatoes, pie, etc., hung out, listened to Christmas music and played a rousing game of Canadian Cranium. Yes, you read that right, it wasn't just Cranium, but Canadian Cranium (it was Angela's game, and she's Canadian) so there were some questions that we could answer, mixed with some questions about ice hockey, Saskatchewan, etc. It also had Canadian flags on every side of the box, which was amusing.

Between Christmas and New Years I went skiing with all my coworkers on a trip that my boss, Mr. So, payed for. It was a really nice ski resort called YongPyong, that is arguably the best in Korea and was in competition to host the next winter olympics, although they didn't quite make it. I rode a gondola (as in the enclosed ski lift, not the Venician boat) for the first time there, which was fun, and I got in some good snowboarding, especially with my coworker Marty.

For New Year's Eve I met up with Izzie and Calvin (the new pastor of my church here, the two of them are in this first picture), and we saw King Kong, which was pretty ridiculous. If you can sit through over 3 hours of people fighting everything from animalistic natives to veloceraptors to giant mutated man-eating bugs, and King Kong battling T-Rexes and wreaking havoc on 1920s New York, then you might actually enjoy it. After King Kong we had dinner with Sam (an old exchange student friend) and then went downtown to Jonggak, the "Times Square of Seoul", for the festivities. And by "the festivities", I mean thousands and thousands of people, most of whom were shooting off roman candle fireworks (picture, bottom left) throughout the evening.

There was also a big stage with performances

on it (although we couldn't see it very
well) and instead of a ball dropping there was a huge bell there that they ring 33 times every new year. There By the time it was over we had roman candle smoke in our eyes and mouths, a layer of ash from them on our clothing, and our ears were ringing, and it was worth every bit of it.