Chirstmas


Christmas in Korea is a very different kind of experience. They don't celebrate it the way we do in the states. Although it is just as commercialized, it is in a different way. To them, Christmas is a couples' holiday. You usually get together with your significant other to get dinner or something on Christmas Eve and then go to do some kind of activity together on Christmas day.


For our gang of 8 in Ulsan, we still wanted to treat it like a family holiday, so in between Skyping with all our families back home, we did all sorts of things together.


First on the list was getting a "family" Christmas picture taken. I brought my camera and dragged everyone along to see the lights they had put up at Ulsan and got everyone to sit still long enough to take a nice photo...

Top row, left to right: Andrew, Jaryt, Tuba, and Shane.
Bottom row, left to right: Nicole(me), Lauren, Jarah, and Ashley.
Also known as "Ulsan's Great Eight". =)

Christmas in Korea showed up in all sorts of random moments. The first Christmas present I got was from a teacher at school that gave me a pair of socks with the American flag in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head.


On the street downtown on Christmas eve, there were all sorts of festivities. The normal street vendors were now dressed in Santa outfits. There was a Christmas concert going on in the square behind Hyundai Department Store. In front of Upsquare mall there were ice sculptures and a ton of artificially made snow that kids were sledding in and making snowmen with.




On Christmas day, I spent the entire afternoon cooking again for our Christmas dinner. This time we had the party a Lauren's apartment (hers is the biggest, but has the smallest kitchen). So I had to cook everything and then transport it there. This time though, others helped out by bringing salad, lotus roots, and making the majority of the chicken.


This time, the menu consisted of: stuffing, lemon baked chicken, salad, fried veggies, salt potatoes, corn bread, seasoned and fried chicken, a ham steak, lotus roots, chocolate chip cookies and sugar cookies.


In the midst of many, many group pictures with Lauren's selfie stick, we had a Secret Santa gift exchange, played some games (including the one where you have to eat a donut hanging from a string without using your hands - and I won!!), and we exchanged some gifts that we had made for the whole gang. I had printed the "family" Christmas picture and handed it out for everyone to have. Lauren made us all little goodie bags with a Christmas pencil, a chocolate, and a soju key chain. Andrew and Shane actually wrote and recorded a rap about our "Ulsan Great Eight", which was hilarious and perfect.


All in all, it was a perfect, fun and festive night with the family before we all went home, stayed up all night talking to our families back home who were celebrating Christmas morning and then all of us having to go to work the next day exhausted. Still a fun Christmas experience in Korea. We made the most of it.



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