Happy Chuseok

Happy Chuseok – a few days late. This past Tuesday was Chuseok, the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving (American Thanksgiving, that is). It’s a harvest celebration with lots of food and a five-day weekend, without the sales. We were fortunate enough to be invited to celebrate Chuseok with Paul’s co-teacher and his family; so, on Tuesday morning, we were up and at the train station at 6:30 and arrived at Mr. Kim’s house an hour later. We were introduced to his family and ushered onto the couch, where we sat and watched the news (in Korean) with the men of the family (the women, of course, cook the meal, but there was no real way for me to ask to help. In fact, I think that might be considered rude here – I’m not sure.) By 8:30 the meal was ready and we sat down to large helpings of beef and onion stew, bulgogi (a beef dish), boiled chicken and fish. (The whole meal seemed rather full of meats.) For desert, we ate apples and pears and songpyeon, a sort of rice-cake that’s the ‘signature dish’ of the Chuseok meal.

After the meal, Mr. Kim and his brother took us to the nearby Korean Folk Village. The houses – except for the wealthy person’s house – all had thatched roofs and mud floors. Cooking was done in a fire-pit built into the kitchen floor. It was all the sort of thing that you might expect, until Mr. Kim said, “this is a traditional farmer’s house. This is the kind of house I grew up in.” Mr. Kim can’t be fifty, and yet, during his lifetime, Korea has made its way from a third-world, thatch-roof country, to a developed nation stuffed with sky-scraper apartment buildings.

There were some really neat shows at the Folk Village as well: a gymnastic see-saw performance, a tightrope walker (who had to be over fifty-five), and a traditional farmers dance which involved men with four different kind of drums and hats with long strings attached. The men who danced with the hats were really neat.

It seems as though going to the Folk Village on Chuseok is a rather popular thing to do. By the time we were leaving at 2:00, the park was getting quite full. Many of the children came dressed in hanbok, the traditional Korean costume.

The rest of our holiday was spent relaxing. We took two trips to Seoul: we were able to see Gyeongbokgung, one of the old royal palaces; we walked by the Blue House (the President’s residence), and wandered through Kyobo, one of the largest bookstores in Seoul. All in all, it was a good holiday, even if we couldn’t spend it traveling.