Happy Thanksgiving! (Less so here)

Happy Thanksgiving from Korea, where it's not actually Thanksgiving. Here the third Thursday in November is just like any other day.

Koreans do celebrate a kind of Thanksgiving or harvest festival. Ch'usok is a three-day event beginning on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, so usually in mid-September. It's a major holiday, bigger and more significant than our Thanksgiving for us or Christmas for them.

Ch'usok is a time to give gifts, take off from work to spend with family and generally eat and drink a lot more than usual. When I'd ask my students what kinds of food they eat at Ch'usok they'd always say "Songpyon" which are small rice-cakes. I don't believe that's all they eat for three days, but no one ever offered additional answers.

Koreans are serious about this Ch'usok; virtually eveything is closed in the entire country. By comparison, Christmas is only a single-day event and people usually go out so things stay open. I went to a department store by accident before Ch'usok and it was more crowded than any American mall I've ever been to the day before Christmas or the day after Thanksgiving.

For our Thanksgiving in Korea, Danny, Brandon and I are going with some of Brandon's teachers to a vegetarian buffet in Seomyeong. We were there once before and it was fantastic, which is good since I believe it is the only wholly vegetarian resturant in the city.

This morning, one of my Korean co-English teachers came up to me in the faculty lounge and said, "You are probably sad because it is American Thanksgiving and you miss your family and friends. So I got you this present." She handed me a box. Inside was the beautiful blue scarf with white stars I am wearing in this picture.