Notice how I'm not in the picture...

This weekend is Lunar New Year in Korea (Seollal) and wow is it a busy time. Seollal is basically the equivalent of Christmas for Westerners in terms of significance as a time to get together with family. Families celebrate in various ways here, but one of the common threads seems to be offering up thanks to ancestors through ritual. This may be accompanied by a kind of gambling game called 'Go-Stop' played with mini pictured cards, and the elders giving pocket money to the kids. The offering made to the ancestors (세배) involves setting up a table with an elaborate spread of different foods symbolizing various things. A nicely detailed article on this can be found here. A lot of food and preparation is required. For the past week or so doing grocery shopping has been a nightmare as families have been stocking up on fantastic quantities of food and gifts. Today at the street market it took me much longer than usual to navigate as a there were all kinds of people doing last minute shopping.

Of course one of the biggest effects this holiday has is that of temporary population relocation. A constant source of fascination to me is what happens when almost 50 million people all decide it's time to go back to Grandma's house for the holidays. With approximately a quarter of the population in Seoul, when many of these folk head out to their hometowns sprinkled around the peninsula it creates some magnificent traffic jams. The drive from Seoul to Busan on a good day should take about five hours. Traffic authorities predict it will take over eight hours this weekend as an estimated 30 000 000 (just under the population of Canada - yay!) will be on the move. Yikes! Many people opt to try and minimize these woes by chosing another form of transport: bus, train and plane tickets are sold out months in advance and general pandemonium erupts at most major stations and terminals throughout the country. That's why I thought I'd point out I'm not in that picture - I'm safely at home visiting my family and friends through the modern wonder of the blog!