Spring Is Getting ...

up off the couch and pressing its nose to the window, looking to see if it's time to come out. Winter in Seoul is a tenacious old bastard, but it looks to be receding into the shortening shadows, finally.

At this time of year, I examine the gray tangle of 개나리 kenari bushes for the first flowers on my walk to school, as the little yellow bells are the harbinger of springtime here on the peninsula. There were buds last Friday, but the first few blossoms showed up on Monday, as seen via iPhone photos below:



I have previously blogged quite a bit about the annual flowering (check out this post from 2010, for example. Note that the first flowers were a full two weeks earlier that year!)

Another sign of spring, this one purely on the human calendar, not Mother Nature's, is baseball's Opening Day, which arrives this Saturday. I'll be there once again, thanks to good friend Nick's intrepid Korean internet skills for ordering tickets, and his forethought and foresight, as well.

So as Seoul awakes from its winter slumber, perhaps I will shake off my blogless torpor and treat you, dear reader, to more frequent missives from the Patch. I can almost guarantee more photos of the spring flowers, as I am anxious to see how I can do with my expensive new Nikon D5100. It even has a preset for "spring blossoms". So do I.