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.

This is just a short post. My apologies to those of you who have been following my blog for not putting up more lately.

A few weeks ago, Koreans celebrated Chuseok, their harvest festival or Thanksgiving. It was a short week and most of my students were anxious for free-time and rice cakes.

So we took it easy. I showed them a short video and played a number of games intended to compare Korean Thanksgiving with American Thanksgiving. Most of my lessons were unremarkable. But in one, I was left completely dumbfounded by either my students' confusion, or their ability to play some post-modern practical joke on me...

One of the games we played in this lesson was a modified spelling bee. I would ask about words having to do with Thanksgiving in America. An obvious one was "turkey."

But in one class, the first person to raise his hand to spell turkey exclaimed "R-A-B-B-I-T."

"Um... no," I said, thinking perhaps this student had misheard or had some other problem. I went to the next student.

"R-A-B-B-I-T."

"No. I said. That's how you spell rabbit..."

Third student. "T-U-R-C-A-Y."

"No," I said, "but closer."

I went to the fourth and final student before I began questioning reality.

"R-A-B-B-I-T."

My only possible explanation is that another teacher decided to play a horrible trick on these students and teach them that you spell "turkey" as "rabbit," simply hoping this exact tale would play out.

Well other evil teacher... if that's true, I hope you find this story and see your devious plot was successful.