A Very Happy Chusock in Seoul

The past week all of Korea has been celebrating the Chusock holiday, which is a little bit of a mixture between Thanksgivng and Day of the Dead. It's main purpose is to celebrate the harvest so people all go home to their parents/grandparents houses for a huge feast. Another part of the tradition is to bow to your ancestors to show respect.
Our original plan fro tehe week off of work was to go check out the national park North of here that we have been dying to see, but our school bribed us with a lot of money to stay and work over the break...and we gave in. It ended up workng out well though. Our classes were really great (other than starting at 7 am), some of the top students in Korea. They are all prepping to get into the very elite highschools. My job was basically to talk to them about writing and brainstorm possible essay questions about current global issues...I was in heaven. These kids blew my mind though. They are highschoolers who write better than most first year college students in the US do. It always does make a me a little sad though because I doubt they actually had a childhood outside of school.
Our Busan girls came up to Seoul for the holiday and we decided that we should have a practice run for real Thanksgiving in celebration of Chusock. We decided to boil chickens since there are no ovens or turkeys in Korea. At the store, the whole chickens were really whole, head and all. Rachel and I looked at each other and discussed what you do if the chicken still has a head and you don't have that sharp of knives. Luckily the butcher caught our look of concern and tried to point us to teh pre-cut breasts. We told him we wanted this and asked him to chop the head, he looked at us a little crazy, but chopped it for us. Headless chicken dinner went great and we had even found pumpkin pie at Costco! I had about 12 people in my studio apartment and I was feeling thankful and content for all of the wonderful people I have met here.
On the real Chusock which was Tuesday, our Korean mom's brought us over tons of tradition Korean Chusock foods. 상 평 (Songpyeon) is a rice cake stuffed either sweet bean, sesame or sweet potato. It is a Korean myth that if a woman can make pretty songpyeon she will have beautiful children. We also ate many fried pancake-like things with different things in them. It was so nice of them to come over, it really felt like family coming and making sure we were not celebrating the holiday alone. We decided to have them over for dinner the following night, so we cooked them pesto past with sundried tomatos and spinach. Mrs. Im brought over a 한 박 (Han-Bak) which is a Korean traditional outfit. She had me try it on since we are about the same size. She explained to me that it is a hanbak that you wear to bow to your husbands parents when you get married, which she taught Rachel and I how to properly do. I took it off before dinner and folded it up to give it back to her and she said "no, this is a gift". I did not really know what to do, I thought I might start tearing. She gave me one of her wedding dresses! So I promised if I do ever get married I will bow in the Korean dress. I just cannot get over how generous and friendly people in Korea are. They are also so proud of their culture and absolutly love to share it with us.
As the Chusock holiday comes to an end I sit in my apartment quite happy.