Chinese New Year in Korea

Chinese New Year (CNY) is the biggest holiday in China. Millions of Chinese return to their hometown, visit family, relax, and eat. Meanwhile the thousands of foreigners in China go on vacation or stay at home and watch DVDs for a week.

For the last several years I’ve been leaving China for CNY and this year is no different, I am headed to Seoul, South Korea. Getting out of China for a short time allows me to recharge in a way that’s not possible in Shanghai. It will be nice to forget about Shanghai for a week and see a new place.

As usual, I don’t have an itinerary. There are a few site I feel obligated to see, but largely I’ll be relaxing. I want to sample a wide variety of authentic Korean food, read a few books and generally be lazy for a week.

Along the way I’ll be taking quite a few pictures. Currently I have a Panasonic LX-2 that I’l be taking with me. It is 10.2 megapixel compact camera modeled after the Leica D-Lux 3. It’s a tiny camera with a lot of power and because of that it’s what I take most of my pictures with. The battery will stay charged long enough to take several days worth of shots and the 2GB memory card rarely fills up.

When I get back to Shanghai I’m going to dump all my photos into the Apple’s new Aperture 3 and within 30 days I need to decide if it’s a worthy investment. Currently all my photos are managed in iPhoto which is fine, but lately it’s become cumbersome.

I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures of food while I’m in Korea but I’m not sure any of those dishes will make it onto Kung Fu Eats, but the pictures will certainly appear in Flickr. Wheel’s up in just a few days, and it’s looking like a fun ride.