Rockin' the Chuseok

Everyone looks forward to American holidays: the time off, the tasty food, maybe a bit of family mixed in. Year in and year out I’m pleasantly refreshed by the beginning of January and ready to take on the new year. Naturally then it’s a pleasant surprise to spend time with a new family and get to know another set of holidays. This past week was Chuseok, one of two major holiday periods in Korea—I’m not sure what the other one is yet, but I’ll report back on that as soon as it rolls around. The Gods of Chuseok must have been looking out for me though when they scheduled it on a Tuesday-Thursday; meaning why bother go to work on a Friday? I.e. we get a 6 day weekend, time to eat, time to relax, and time to travel.

Apparently the first day of Chuseok is a cooking day, hence that’s exactly what the host family did. My pseudo-father over here is the eldest brother of the family, which means that all the festivities go down at our apartment. Tuesday morning rolls around and my host mom is frying, grilling, rolling her way to perfection alongside grandma and a few other relatives. Needless to say there’s a prescribed list of food to cook—kind of like a Thanksgiving turkey, green bean casserole, etc except that everyone in the country cooks pretty much the same thing. This includes an assortment of fruits, fried vegetables, raw and supposedly cooked poultry, beef, and pork, rice and a thousand different kimchi.

I’m pretty sure my host parents were up till at least 12pm cooking, but that’s nothing when you consider they got up at 4 pm to start cooking again and get things ready for the big hurrah. The big hurrah, of course, is when I get to whip out my brand spankin’ new Hanbok—i.e. the traditional Korean outfit that I mentioned in the last. I’m pretty sure I could never find one of these in the stores that would fit me, but old Jungang High School decided to throw down and have one tailored to fit me…so who am I to complain? I will wear it with pride. I mean, even in Korean people nowadays wear it at most twice a year (for each of the two holiday)—I’m sure I could make it work at least for Halloween parties and whatever random Korean ballroom galas I go to back home (wait, what?). In any case, I wore the getup a few hours Wednesday morning when the family bowed down in front of the food laid out on a bunch of tiny wooden platters. There are, apparently, two rounds of bowing, followed by some waiting, and then we finished with a quick round of eating. I’m actually a little surprised that we didn’t eat most of the food that was laid out—but I guess that was for the ancestors, not us. Damn, what was I thinking.

Considering how much time they spent cooking, the thirty-minute or so bowing and eating part was actually a bit anticlimactic. Regardless though, we spent the rest of the day running all around the province, bowing in front of the ancestral gravesites and visiting relatives that I’m pretty sure my host family only sees one day a year. By that I mean I saround for most of the day, get in a few words of garbled conversation here and there with various country folk and eat whatever sort of sumptuous sustenance they put in front of me. By the end of it all, I’m ready for my trip to Jeju Island.