New Years in Pohang

If there is one thing I learned this New Years, it would be that spending New Years on the coast is a BAD idea ... unless you are some place tropical. Korea is not tropical.

We finally got a few days off work and had a five day weekend over the New Years holiday. My idea was to get out of Daegu and see some more of the country. So me and my friends Sarai and Marla decided to head to Pohang. Pohang is a smaller costal city on the south eastern side of the country. We chose this location for two reasons. One being that a friend of mine from University is living there right now, and two being that they were having a "sunrise festival" on the beach for New Years Eve.

Seeing my friend Jeremy was great. He took us out for some good food and to a few different bars. I even hopped back in the pool for a "workout". It was great to get back in the pool and I'm looking to find a pool in my area that has lane swimming - no luck so far.

For New Years Eve we traveled to a very isolated spot at the most Eastern point of Korea - a peninsula in Pohang - for the sunrise festival. When we arrived at the festival we went to one of the many food tents to have some traditional Korean soup, hoping this would help to get the warmth in our bodies and keep it there for the night. We then went to the stage to watch some of the performances, and of course the countdown to midnight.

There was supposed to be a 'tonne' of stuff going on from midnight until the sunrise, but at about 1am the stage went black and it looked like everyone was leaving. With really nothing to do and 6 or so hours to kill until the sun starting to come up we spent our time going between a souvenir shop and a convenience store where we had countless cups of coffee and bowls of soup. One of the funniest memories of the night was walking into the souvenir shop to see about a hundred Koreans sitting cross legged in the aisles sleeping - weird! I have never been so happy in my life to see the sun come up. As soon as the sky started lightening, hundreds of people started coming back (where they went for 6 hours we will never know). It was actually a really cool feeling to be standing at the side of the ocean watching the first sunrise of the New Year. It was definately a New Years I will never forget.