Lunar New Year Gifts

Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) is coming up later this month. Here are a few advertisements for New Year's gifts from the newspaper we subscribe to. (Click through for larger images).

A lot of the gift packs contain raw meat. Apparently the way this works is that the store will hand-deliver directly to the gift recipient, after ascertaining that they are home to receive it.

(L) Korean beef gift set #1; (M) Korean beef gift set #2; (R) Korean beef health set #1

Here from E-Mart we've got more raw meat, some fruit, some dried whole fish, and ginseng.

Top: (L) Beef kalbi ($250); (R) apples and Asian pears ($88)
Bottom: dried yellow croaker ($220), ginseng ($218), Asian pairs ($68), nut & fruit set ($92)

And, of course, the fancy Spam gift set.

Top: (L) Richam ($45); (R) hair loss prevention lotions ($39)
Bottom: apples ($34), dried anchovies ($27), canola oil ($8), toiletry set ($16)

UPDATE (10:49pm): About an hour after I first posted this blog entry, a delivery guy came to the door (at 9:30pm) with this package from E-Mart.

It's the exact same beef kalbi set seen in the newspaper ad above!

"Traditional Kalbi Flavoring: 'The Gift' "

 Since I'm here anyway updating the blog entry, here's another ad for a wider array of raw meat gifts, from the store Cheonnyeon Hanu 천년한우 "A Thousand Years of Korean Beef" here in Gyeongu.

Update: I've learned that cheonnyeon "thousand years" is a nickname for Gyeongju, which was an ancient capital city for about 1000 years, and thus is referred to as cheonnyeon godo 천년고도(千年古都) "the thousand-year ancient capital". So perhaps the name of this local beef store is better translated as "Thousand-Year Ancient Capital Beef" or, less poetically, "Gyeongju Beef".