Happy New Year

Happy 2007 everybody! We are still in Korea, so we thought we would share our experience regarding the new years celebration here. Jeff had to work on New Year's Eve, so we thought we would relax in the evening and head out around later at night (10:00 or so). We had been searching online for good bars in Ulsan, but we couldn't find anything reasonably close to our hotel, so we decided we would head down to the Jungle Plaza. Its a cool Thailand themed bar in the basement of our hotel. We have been down there for drinks a few times, and it was never busy, so we figured we would be fine just hanging out there and listening to the live music. We got ready and headed downstairs only to find that all of the seats at the bar were reserved for the night! Who would ever think of reserving a seat at a bar!!! We were shocked and decided we better get moving to try and find another place to celebrate! We went upstairs, got our coats and headed out. We didn't want to go to an all Korean bar, and had earlier seen a bar called "Miller Time," so we thought we would head over there and hope it was fun (and that they had seats!).

When we got there it was about 10:30 and there were 8 tables or so still available. We sat down and ordered some nachos and a pitcher of MGD. We knew a bar like Miller Time would carry Miller products, but what we didn't realize is that Miller was literally all they had (no other beer, no wine, no liquor)! We ate our nachos (which were very interesting - they had mustard all over them), drank our beer, and waited for the big countdown. There was a large screen at the back of the bar that started counting down with two minutes to go:

At midnight everyone cheered and toasted, just like you would expect in any American bar. However, as soon as the cheering began, it was over and the bar went back to normal. No confetti, no noise makers, no singing Auld Lang Syne, in fact, no music at all! This gentleman wasn't even awakened by the low key celebration:

Our waiter was kind enough to take a picture of Jeff and I to commemorate our first New Years as newlyweds:

I guess we realized that New Years is not quite as big of a celebration here as it is back home!