Thursday, October 1, 2009

Chuseok

It is Thursday, October 1, and all of the kids at work are a twitter. Why? Because Chuseok is coming! Chuseok is on the third of October.


What is Chuseok? Well, whenever I ask a Korean person what Chuseok is, they tell me it is like American Thanksgiving. However, since there was no friendship forged between Native people and pilgrims that later led to the massacre of the Native people here in Korea (that I know of...my Korean history is lacking), I looked it up on Wikipedia for more information.


It turns out that Chuseok is a fall harvest ritual. It is customary for people celebrating Chuseok to return to the home of their ancestors and have rituals to remember them. This picture is of the traditional food people eat on Chuseok. Since I do not have Korean ancestors, for me this means everything is shut down starting tomorrow and until Tuesday. There will be a ton of traffic and the subways will be packed. I was advised to not travel unless absolutely necessary due to the long waiting times. There are lots of Koreans here with places to go!


Chin-Hwa's family is celebrating Chuseok, but because he is out training and I do not know Korean, (conversation would be decidedly short-lived) we will not be celebrating with them. However, do not be sad because I will instead be playing games with some of the women I have met here. Do you think Army spouses would care for Settlers? We're about to find out...

2 comments:

  1. one of my biggest regrets is that i never played settlers with you.

    you need a GG watching group!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Must be nice to be young enough to have one of your biggest regrets not playing a board game with of course the self appointed queen of catan.

    ReplyDelete