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.

Friday night, Danny wasn't feel particularly well, so the boy-os and I decided upon an easy evening at home. The plan was for them to come over to my place where we'd get a pizza, rent and watch a DVD and maybe have a single cocktail.

We choose my home because I've got a connector to hook my MacBook up to my television making it a makeshift DVD player. Unfortunately, I was an idiot and forgot said connector at school.

Unwilling to admit defeat, I offered to go out and buy a new DVD player; I justified it as a worthy investment should a similar situation arise again in the next 10 months.

Here's where the story gets strange. I walked from one electronics store in my neighborhood to another, and each turned me away. Not only did they viscerally deny they had DVD players for sale, they would rush me to the exit after my request. Keep in mind, DVDs aren't novel here. You can buy them on any street, in subway stops and rent them in any neighborhood. Where then do people get these players?

I called my Korean friend who lives in the area for advice. He replied, "Oh... you will have to travel very far." What? I thought, I'm not asking to buy Egyptian spices.

It gets stranger.

In at least three of the stores I walked into, I actually found DVD players sitting on the shelves. When I would bring them to the store owner, he/she would get the same uncomfortable look and send me out the door. A Korean friend later suggested perhaps these were all DVD players that were being repaired at the store and weren't for sale. That could have been the case at two of the stores (the players were just sitting out on the shelf without much care to their display) but in one store the player I looked at was still in the package.

In the end I settled on buying a VHS tape player that was literally sitting on top of a DVD player. When I asked in Korean, "How much for this one," and pointed to the DVD player, the owner simply replied, "No, no. Bad." He continued wrapping up my new old VHS player and sent me on my way.

Today in a second grade class a student was trying to use English to ask his friend to bring him a dustpan. The only problem was he didn't know the word 'dustpan' in English.

After struggling for a moment, the student said, "Bring me broom's best friend."

And it worked.