Chusok Break

We have a five day break over Chusok, the Korean harvest celebration. There was a celebration at school on Wednesday where we all wore hamboks, played Korean games, made Korean toys, and made Korean foods. Of corse, my camera ran out of batteries halfway through the day. Hopefully I will be able to get copies of the pictures the school took. Once I have those, then you can see me wearing my hambok. For now, I just have a few of my kids.

The top left picture is my class. There are eight students, six girls and two boys. They all looked so cute all dressed up that day. The top right picture is the kids making SongPyon, traditional rice cakes. This is something that families do together when they gather for Chusok. The picture on the left is the kids playing Kangkangsulrae, which is kind of like playing London Bridge is Falling Down.

All of the teachers were given a gift set for Chusok. A normal gift set consists of a lot of toothpaste, and soaps. I think that I am set for toothpaste until next Chusok when we get another set.

(This is the toothpaste) Thank goodness...... my teeth never were very good at math.

Over the break, I have had the oportunity to explore Seoul. The first place that I went was 창덕궁 (Changdeokgung palace and secret garden). In order to go in, you have to be on a tour. They have three English tours a day, and I happen to walk in the moment that one of them started. It was an hour and a half tour, and it only cost 3000 won, or about $2.40. The palace and history behind it is amazing.

I can't post all of my pictures, so I am going to pick and choose some. This is the throne room and the throne. The building looks the same on the outside as most of the other buildings in the complex. The picture on the left is under the awning. The spikes there are to keep the birds from building nests.

A couple of the buildings were destroyed by a fire in 1917. Now they have a fire hydrant in the middle of this historical complex. It probably would have come in handy ninety years ago, but it just looks silly now.

At the very end of the tour, there was a 750 year old tree. What I saw was not exactly what I was expecting. In minnesota, usually the older the tree, the taller it is. A 750 year old tree? I was expecting it to be hundreds of feet tall. This tree was maybe 25 feet tall.

I will tell you about more of my adventures in my next posts. Love you all. I am really missing my family and friends over the holidays here when everyone else is with loved ones.