Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year!

WELL, this is my year - the Year of the Dog.

I am, according to the Chinese Horoscope, a Water Dog, which means I have incredible foresight and am well educated on many subjects - this enables me to appreciate other people's point of view. I'm quite liberal, I have a flexible nature and I appreciate differences.

Oh yes, and I always have friends because I'm a popular person. hehe. Gotta love Chinese prophecy.

Koreans take the Lunar New Year very seriously. Seoul becomes a ghost city as people head to outer provinces visiting family, and the roads become clogged arteries.

Koreans have particular foods for special occasions. For Lunar New Year it's glutinous rice cakes - unfilled (not pictured) - which are pressed with different patterns to represent different types of good fortune, such as love or long life.

I'm unsure how they're made, but the texture is very soft and almost jelly-like. There really is nothing edible from home that I can compare it to, so I'll go with this one - it's like a cross between playdough and Gak (does anyone remember Gak?).

There's all different types of rice cakes - on Chuseok, which is the Harvest Moon Festival - a kind of Thanksgiving, they have crescent-shaped rice cakes and small ball-shaped cakes filled with a sweet honey and roasted sesame seed mixture.
The ones we bought at the weekend (pictured) were filled with a sweet nutty mixture. It's a subtle flavour but very lovely. Most unfilled ones are quite bland but they pack a punch of fibre, I reckon.

We escaped Incheon over the long weekend to a city about an hour south of Seoul called Suwon. It was fabulous.

In the 1700s this 6km fortress wall known as Hwaseong Fortress, a World Heritage-listed site which is now mostly restored, was built to protect the city.

Although Suwon has now spread beyond the fortress, it is an incredible stone structure carving through the city, dotted with pagoda-type monuments, and still gives the feeling of protection.

At one point in the walk, on a ridge overlooking Suwon, is the Bell of Hyowon, built in 1991 to be a symbol of the city.

It cost 1000 won (AUD$1.20) to ring it three times, and yeah, it was a bit touristy but we gave it a birl.

A lovely Korean guy took this photo (below) for us and told us that the first toll is for gratitude and respect to your parents; the second is for your family's health and happiness and the third toll is for the realisation of your dreams.

The sound is huge - big bass notes reverberating across the valley of Suwon, which can be heard kilometres across the city.

The Bell of Hyowon - 3.5m high, 2.5m diameter and 12.5 tonnes.

We took two and a half hours to amble along the wall, taking too many photographs and walking inside too many "look-outs" (formerly known as bastions to shoot enemies from).

More pics to follow. Wrist sore. Eyes tired. Must sleep. Happy New Year!