Wednesday 9 May 2012

Spring has sprung and gone.



 

Spring has sprung!  The sap is rising, the weather is getting warmer and yours truly, dear readers, is high on life!

I'm also running around the place as busy as a blue-arsed fly - as we so eloquently put it back in the Auld Sod!
So while I have enough witty remarks and profound insights to fill six blog posts, God alone knows when I'll find the time to sit and type it.

So this following offering will be short, but hopefully sweet?

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What fascinates and delights me about the change in the seasons is that the transistion happens so quickly and decisively.  As if even Mother Nature follows the Korean mantra of 'Bali, bali!!' (Quickly, quickly!)
You can almost.........almost set your watch by it.
Four weeks ago it was still cold enough that going anywhere without gloves was the height of folly.
Two days ago Ms.Amused came over to my place brandishing THREE mosquito bites.
(It's a little bit insane how irresistible they find her.)

This is an unending source of wonder to a girl from a country whose seasons bleed into each other like a red sock in a white wash!

It's very bemusing to us foreigners that one of the first topics of conversation with many Koreans is:
 "Korea has four seasons. Does your country have four seasons?"

Like most other mysteries we stumble across over here, once you start to scratch the surface, you quickly find the internal logic.

  • Unlike us Westerners, Korea is neighbourly with several countries which DON'T have four seasons. 
  • The change of seasons is still marked by large, important festivals here in Korea - in much the same way that the Celtic fire festivals of Lughnasa, Samhain and Bealtaine used to mark the seasons for us in Ireland.
  •  Most Koreans learn this phrase as a rote piece in English class.
And while I mention the rote learning - it may seem a tad random, but it's a damn sight more useful than some of the stuff I learnt in French class!
Exhibit A: "The hat of my aunt is on the table."
Now, I have an above average number of aunts, but this is still not a sentence I'mma gonna need a whole lot!!

And you know something else?
After being here for a full cycle of seasons, I'm getting pretty psyched about it myself.
Last Fall was the most perfect I have ever experienced anywhere - a textbook autumn it was- with crisp fresh mornings and warm sunny days filled with a glorious palette of colour.

Now we've just had our 'blink and you miss it' Spring. 
This is a season which I particularly adore because my earliest images of Asia came from novels and movies set in Japan - so naturally enough, cherry blossoms falling like snow flash me right back to my adolesence and my plans to conquer the world - only to snap back to reality and find, yep, I'm actually in Asia!




Tis heady stuff, I tell ya!!

So here we are, a scant few weeks later and already heading into summer.  The winter clothes have been packed away in vaccuum packed bags.  (This is essential, not just for saving space but to protect them from the killer humidity we're going to get in a few months.)
I have dug up the air con remote control and any day now I'll be buying my first watermelon popsicle!


This of course, is why Spring is such a cherished season here in Korea.  It is an astonishingly beautiful and gentle season, which doesn't last long, so it never gets taken for granted.






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