Allie's Got Seoul: Chuseok

Oh, Chuseok, why must you end? I write having just come off a lovely five-day vacation. This past Sunday was Chuseok, one of the biggest holidays in Korea. Saturday and Monday were also celebratory days. Wednesday was another holiday called National Foundation Day so most schools also closed on Tuesday to create a whopping five-day break!

Chuseok is a harvest celebration in Autumn and is based off the lunar calendar. Koreans travel to their ancestral homelands making it a nightmare to get in and out of Seoul throughout the weekend. The holiday includes huge feasts of traditional Korean food so the holiday is often described to foreigners as Korean Thanksgiving. My students all mentioned a rice dessert called songpyeon, which I take to be the pumpkin pie to our Thanksgiving. Visiting the ancestral tombs is another important component of Chuseok celebrations. National Foundation Day is a smaller holiday that happens to fall right after Chuseok on Wednesday this year because it is based on the solar calendar. It commemorates the founding of the first Korean state in 2457 BC.

Let the festivities begin! Friday evening we kicked off Chuseok at WILS. After work, we gathered around the reading room table for a WILS family Chuseok dinner. The cleaning later prepared bibimbap (veggies mixed with rice) and japchae (sweet potato stir-fried noodles). As many grapes in Korea do, we ate grapes that ACTUALLY taste like grape flavored candy. The president of the school each gave us a bottle of wine that she had waited for hours in an extremely crowded E-mart to get due to the holiday. (Gift giving is very customary during Chuseok. Earlier that week Bethany and I received a canola oil and spam gift set from our neighbor, despite not having met other than the night he told us to turn our music down…)

Had I not just arrived in Seoul five weeks earlier, I may have used Chuseok break to spend a few nights traveling outside of the city. Coincidentally, I had relatives in town for the weekend and I spent Saturday and Sunday exploring the city with them. I would like to say I had been their tour guide, but by and large everything we saw was brand new to me as well. In the course of two days, we visited Namsangol Hanok Village, the American Embassy, Gyeongbokgung Palace, Insadong, Jogyesa Buddhist Temple, Cheongyechenon River Walk, the Gangnam and Apgujeong areas, Hangang Park, and the National Museum of Korea. Due to the holiday, fewer people were out than normal. Apgujeong felt like a ghost town, but conversely it was a great time to visit the museum!

I also enjoyed incredible views of Seoul from the 40^th floor of their hotel. I had not seen Seoul from this vantage point yet...and it was incredible. The view looked directly out toward my part of town, marked by the TraPalace and Hyperion Towers. This, combined with delicious and unlimited western breakfast, fruit, and lattes in the morning made for two killer brunches. If only my stomach could have been bigger! In the evening, the club level had a delightful happy hour and dinner to be enjoyed as the sun set over the city. Also a huge thank you to my relatives for bringing an entire suitcase filled with Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods goodies. It was as if oatmeal, maple syrup, funfetti cake mix, canned pumpkin, quinoa, black beans, trail mix and much much more just dropped from heaven. Left the family to rest and Sunday night ended up being a very late night (at least by my standards!) hanging out at bar with coworkers.

My top priority for the long weekend was climbing a local mountain in Seoul. There are so many places to hike in the city that are subway accessible. Unfortunately plans fell through on both Monday and Tuesday, leaving me two open days to fill. Monday ended up becoming the ultimate relaxing day, and probably much needed. After a lazy morning spent at home and a midday jog at the park, I spent the afternoon with a coworker at a jimjilbang, also known as a public bathhouse and sauna. It was incredibly thrilling and relaxing at the same time. Definitely a great experience to have here, so much so that I will dedicate an entire post to the jimjilbang later. The day was capped off with a pizza and movie night with coworkers.

Tuesday, again, opened up last minute so I visited two adjacent palaces, Changdeokgung and Changgyeonggung, in Seoul with a coworker on her last day. The palaces all seem to have similar looks and feels, but they are beautiful and interesting places to visit nonetheless. I will have to make a return trip at some point since we missed the Secret Garden due to inconvenient tour times. In the evening we met for a goodbye dinner at a favorite dakgalbi restaurant, which I have become an avid fan of despite it being cooked with chicken. Dakgalbi, cooked on the table and eaten communally, is typically cabbage, chicken, and a tasty sauce. There are many add-ins such as noodles, rice, cheese, and sweet potato. I am a fan of the particular restaurant we frequent since there is also an unlimited self-serve kimchi, carrot, macaroni salad, and seaweed soup bar. Despite being a vegetarian, I always leave the restaurant bursting at the seams. I cut out of dinner to see an old Semester at Sea friend that I had planned to meet for a drink. He has been teaching here seven months and is already is convinced that he will being staying another year. It was great to see an old familiar face!

Wednesday was spent biking around a lake in Chuncheon with a meet-up group. We could not ask for sunnier or bluer skies or a better temperature. It took a bit of subway and train time to get to this area, but I had a nice time. The scenery was more natural than I would find on the Han River, but just an hour or so outside of Seoul we were by no means in the wilderness. We biked for over four hours, but at a leisurely pace and stopping for lunch and whatnot. Dinner followed at another dakgalbi restaurant (no complaints!) and it was interesting to try a new place and new variations than on what I have become used to having. A couple hours later I arrived back in Mokdong, completely exhausted, and lamenting the end of a fun break!