Happy Lunar New Year!

Today is the first day of the new year in the lunar calendar.  My Korean friends call it Solar (they say it like this: Sole-are).  This is the biggest holiday in Korea (I think).  We had the day off school.  So my amazing husband and I went all out to celebrate (just kidding).  We did not leave the apartment all day.  It was so nice.  We slept in.  Then I decided to do laundry (good decision).  I washed 2 pairs of jeans, 2 pairs of sweat pants, and 2 pairs of running tights (bad decision).  I realized after I started the washer that I had no pants to wear (well I have dress pants, but who wants to wear that on a day off?).  I did the only rational thing.  I put on a pair of shorts, grabbed one of our blankets and wrapped it around me.  One of my friends during college taught me this trick.  You might be saying to yourself right now, "why did you not put on your robe?"  Answer: it is in America with all my other pairs of jeans and sweat pants.  Sidenote: in case you have not heard me rant about it before, we do not have a dryer, just a washer.  It is not too bad, except we end up with a lot more lint :)

Thank you Ovenless Chef for letting me borrow your picture!

My amazing husband did some "baking" today (Korean style).  I had a tried this ginger cookie recipe last week with some success.  My amazing husband decided to give it another go today.  He added an extra egg to the recipe and instead of cooking them in the skillet, he zapped them in the microwave for about a minute.  They were delicious!  We sadly, both got sugar highs from them.  He had a headache and I had a stomachache.  We do eat sugar - in our coffee, we have cake sometimes - but for whatever reason, they cookies were too much for us (go figure).  I can only imagine the sugar high I will have when I get back to the USA and have some real dessert!  Thankfully the sugar high passed and I was able to gobble up some more cookies. 

About this time, I realized that I should probably go for a run (help combat all that cookie-ness).  My amazing husband turned on the TV to flip through channels.  Sometimes there are really funny Korean TV shows, every so often we find something in English that we like.  Cha-ching!  Without Reservations was on!  Woohoo!  I promptly decided to cuddle up in bed for an hour and watch the movie.  I could run afterwards, right?  Wrong.  As Without Reservations started rolling its credits, the next movie came on.  Would you like to know what it was?  Pride and Prejudice (the newer, not BBC one) I LOVE this movie!  I LOVE IT! And I have not seen the entire movie in quite sometime....so there was no running for me today.  It happens every so often (by every so often I mean one day a week) 

Hanbok

I say ALL of that to say...I have no idea what happened outside our apartment today.  I have no idea how Koreans celebrate Lunar New Year.  I do know that some Koreans get dressed up in hanbok (traditional and beautiful Korean clothes).  We were also told that kids bow to their parents or grandparents today.  I think there is a big meal involved as well. 2011 is the year of the Rabbit.  I was born in the year of the Rabbit (a few lunar years ago).  Happy Solar!
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