Chuseok: Thanksgiving with more Kimchi!

This weekend marked another exciting foray into Amy's ancestral homeland: Daegu. The reason for this sojourn? The crazy Korean holiday called Chuseok (click for Wikipedia page... summary follows for lazy readers) It is comparable to Thanksgiving in scope and focus; everybody returns to their hometowns... more specifically, traditionally to the home of the eldest son of a family, which was also traditionally the residence of his parents. Thus, most people today return to their grandparents' house, as the nuclear family continues to gain an edge in the non-Western world. So, everybody gather together with their relatives and pigs out to celebrate the prosperity of the fall harvest. Is this sounding like a certain American holiday yet? The traditional dress for Chuseok is the often brightly-colored hanbok, the traditional dress of Korea. Here is an example of a hanbok:



Yellow and pink are popular colors for women. Children's hanbok are very very very very very colorful, often with rainbow-striped sleeves and primary colors. Both men and women wear hanbok; women's hanbok are kind of like jackets over long skirts, whereas mens are kind of jackets over INCREDIBLY baggy pants. Refer to an older post on this blog to check out my hanbok. :)

Another aspect of Chuseok is ancestor worship, reserved for non-Christians and moderate Christians for the most part these days. People tend their ancestors' graves, make offerings, go to special ceremonies, etc. Amy's family is pretty Christian, so they do not even wear hanbok for Chuseok (What the heck?! At least they do at Seollal - lunar New Year!) or visit graves, let alone practice ancestor worship. I was very sad, as I was eager to wear my hanbok. In church on sunday, the priest ranted at length about how it is terrible for Korean people to mourn and revere the dead in ancestor worship (they go to heaven when they die, silly!), and how even wearing a hanbok for Chuseok means you are going to hell. OK; the second part of that sentence is an exaggeration, but only ever so slightly.

The holiday gives 3 days off to the country. This year, the main day fell on Sunday, so we only got Monday off and were gypped out of another day off because the previous day was Saturday. Early Saturday morning, we trundled up to the KTX bullet train station and headed on down to farmland. We stayed at Amy's maternal grandmother's house, which had been converted from a traditional-style house with a large courtyard and such to a more enclosed sort of dwelling. She had lots of awesome fruit trees around; we enjoyed the pomegranate I picked from the roof. I was jealous of the neighbors' copious persimmon trees, however; I was in the mood for one. It was refreshing to be away from the hustle and bustle of Bundang and have the chance to relax in the sunny fields surrounding Daegu. It was dark and quiet at night, aside from angry jindogae

barking their heads off. We ate tons of delicious food; including having various types of kimchi, fish, and bibimbap for literally 5 meals in a row (the 6th one we ate there lacked bimbimbap).
There was also plenty of fresh fruit, in keeping with the harvest holiday theme. I helped Amy's grandmother make songpyeon along with Amy and one of her aunts. They are a kind of rice-paste dumpling filled with beans, sesame, nuts, or the like. They are traditionally steamed in pine needles for a fresh piney aroma but this time, alas, they were not. I got to meet all sorts of Amy-relatives, including some she didn't really even know, allowing me endless opportunities to sit and stare awkwardly as people babbled at me in crazy Korean moonspeak. All in all, it was a very refreshing weekend, as it mostly consisted of eating, sleeping, and relaxing jaunts through the countryside.