My First (boring!) Chuseok!

   This past week here in Korea was a holiday called 추석- Chuseok. It's a holiday very similar to China's Mid-Autumn festival or the American/Canadian Thanksgiving. It's a holiday centered around the Autumnal Equinox to celebrate the harvest. People leave their city lives to stay with their families in the countryside. They eat traditional Korean foods and exchange gifts. Some (most? I don't have statistics on this one) will dress in traditional Korean clothing called 한복 (hanbok).

Examples of hanboks as worn by the men of the band Super Junior.

Since Chuseok follows the lunar calendar it's different every year. This year it fell in such a way as to give us a 5-day vacation. Foreigners traveled. Koreans visited their grandparents.

And I stayed behind.

This isn't a new thing for me. When I was living in England I missed Thanksgiving. Being a college student at the time, my university's International Student Office put together a Thanksgiving for the foreigners. Instead, my family had kindly shipped what they could of a Thanksgiving meal (pumpkin pie mix, which does not exist in England, for example), I bought the rest of what I could there, and celebrated by giving my English (and Italian! And Welch! And Korean!) friends their first Thanksgiving in the family setting of our friend's home. At the time, someone tried to make me feel bad for not going to the dinner put on my the office.

"They didn't have to do anything for you, you know. You can at least go." He had said. But Thanksgiving, to me, is about family, not food. Yes, I would have had a good time talking with the other foreign exchange students and stuffing my face with catered dinner for an afternoon I'd walk away from and forget. But the day spent teaching my friends who had no previous experience how to prepare Thanksgiving dinner and answering earnest questions such as "what kind of presents do you give for Thanksgiving?" remains one of my fondest memories of England.

I think when it comes down to it, I really like the meaning behind holidays more than their modern interpretation. Thanksgiving (and Chuseok!) are meant to be family holidays. So while I think it's fantastic my English uni offered a Thanksgiving meal and that here in Korea a popular foreigner bar offered a traditional Korean dinner....in both cases I ended up in a small group at home. And I don't necessarily feel badly for that. Don't get me wrong, all of my friends who went abroad or partied their lives away over this vacation deserved it. Everyone who partook in the traditional Chuseok dinner had a very precious cultural experience that's worth it's weight in gold. But for me, my satisfaction with a holiday comes from personal connection.

I spent Chuseok with my boyfriend who was unable to go home due to work. We squeezed ourselves into an over-crowded movie theater for a horror film alongside countless other celebrating families. I brought him wine. He bought me an itchy sweater (that I love dearly because he knew just what color to pick). I cooked a (non-Korean) dinner that was heavy in honor of the gluttony Thanksgiving celebrators love to flourish in. We curled up close and watched some TV and read together. Later on, when work called him away, I joined some friends for some games at one of their houses. I spent all of Chuseok this way- at various friends' houses or stealing free moments with the boyfriend to have dinner or play darts at the bar or study at a cafe. Nothing any more ambitious than I would get up to on a typical weekend, but definitely good ways to spend free time.

I can't wait to hear all about the amazing things my friends who traveled this Chuseok did and saw and experienced. But I'm also going to go to bed tonight content that I just had a wonderful, low-stress, low-cost 5 days. And while I can't wait for the chance to travel to Japan, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the rest of Europe, and Africa? I'm not sorry I didn't see one of those places this vacation.

I was busy with my family :)