Happy Chuseok!

Elisti and Sophia

Chuseok is a harvest festival very simliar to America's Thanksgiving. It usually lasts about three days and the focus of it is to honor elders and perform different rituals and customs. Typically a family will visit both sides of the family during the holiday, so the Chuseok weekend is rather long in order to have time to do so; we had from Friday until Thursday the next week off.
School on Friday was focused around teaching the children different customs that they may expect to see during the holiday. Every child wore their Hambok to school; the traditional dress of Koreans. The children looked adorable dressed up in every color of the rainbow! Us foreign teachers were given Hamboks to wear as well. They are very beautiful but definitely not the most comfortable or flattering outfit I've ever put on.

My Kindergarten Class

First my kindergarteners were taught the right way to bow, and the correct manners for drinking tea. Then they all made their own traditional rice cake dessert and finally they were taken to the gym where they played some traditional Chuseok games. These included throwing a stick into a bucket, kicking some sort of bouncy ball suspended on a string, and my personal favorite- running at a row of lit candles with a towel attempting to blow out all the flames with it at the end.

Learning the correct way to bow

Learning the proper way to drink tea

After a busy day at school I quickly packed up my things and basically ran to the bus station (of course when I actually need a cab there are none to be found). I BARELY missed my bus- i literally was standing at the crosswalk as it drove by, so ended up on the last bus of the night an hour later. I got to Jinju around 10:30 and spent the night there with Morgan, woke up early the next morning and headed to Daegu where we were meeting Shireen and a few of her friends. Shireen is a friend from home who is stationed in Uljin. She went through a program called EPIK, which places teachers in public schools, and had met some people through her training camp which they are all given when they arrive in Korea. 

Out in Daegu

Mo and I trying to find Shireen at the bus stop
(turns out we were at two completely different
ones on opposite sides of town)

We spent the long weekend walking around exploring the town and putting the subway system to use. Daegu has a lot of great shopping. You can find some amazing deals, and also some very expensive stores. We made the  mistake of trying to order food at a Japanese restaurant in the middle of an ally full of upper end shops. Fifteen dollars a person later we had consumed about two thin slices of raw salmon each and a few chunks of tuna so frozen it had steam coming off of it (we thought we were ordering sushi). There are roads in Daegu where all of the shops on it are geared towards the same thing, such as "cell phone ally" where one can choose among many competing cell phone stores. The strangest one was puppy ally. There were hundreds of dogs lining the streets in little glass windows. They all looked impossibly small and like they must have been taken away from their mothers immediately after birth. The best part of the trip was definitely a short hike we took up a mountain/hill that was dead center of Daegu city. The view from the top was amazing and it was very nice to have this beautiful park located right in the heart of the city.

Hiking

The view from the top of our hike
in the middle of Daegu

Monday night we attempted to celebrate the Korean holiday authentically and cooked a big feast. The entire meal was pretty much all thanks to Shireen who did an amazing job at transforming all of the random and strange items we picked up at the market into a slightly less strange and very delicious meal! All in all it was a great trip and wonderful to finally meet up with Shireen! Many thanks to her very nice friends who slept on a hard wooden floor for three nights in order to let us girls have a comfortable bed!