Hey You Daegu!: Happy Chuseok!

This weekend, Korea celebrated Chuseok, which is sort of the equivalent to our Thanksgiving. I asked all of my classes to explain to me what Chuseok was, and got a range of answers - probably similar to the variant that you would get if you asked a class of kids in Canada what Thanksgiving is about.

Here's what was established:
1. They have a family gathering. Many students mentioned getting together and playing with their cousins. One boy said that there was a specific game that they always play together. We had some difficulty pinning down exactly what that game was, but thinking back to what he was saying, the 'sticks' that they throw to determine how far the move on the board were probably dice... something I couldn't quite grasp at the time.
2. They get money from older relatives.
3. They eat a special rice cake with a sweet bean paste filling (they didn't exactly tell me about the paste, but one of the other teachers explained the filling to me)
4. They pray to their ancestors. This minute detail was generally the one I was expecting to hear from most of the students but a surprising few told me about this. Surprisingly enough, it was usually the youngest students who told me about that part of the holiday, while the older students were more interested in the money... Go figure.

I'm assuming the last one could also have something to do with the student's religious beliefs and how traditional their family is.

In the spirit of the holiday, my Hagwon gave all the teachers these lovely gift sets of seasoned seaweed! The tins in the middle of the package are full of snack-sized salted sheets (I've already finished one of them! So good! hey're like healthy chips!) The boxes on the outside are larger sheets. I crumpled on into my rice the other day. Again, quite tasty!)

Anyways, it meant that we got a 5 day weekend! I'm sorry to say that I did very little that was note-worthy over the past 4 days to post about (aside from catch up on some TV watching). I did go hiking with two other teachers today though. We took a bus to the other side of Daegu and trekked up a different bordering mountain to another temple. Early on, I slipped on some sand, ripped my capris and scraped my knee up. Ouch. A lovely lady came over as I was cleaning it out and smeared some cream on it (I'm hoping it was a polisporin-type thing), which was very nice of her. As we continued on, a few other people pointed at it a exclaimed in painful ways. It really wasn't a back scrape, but it kept dripping blood down my leg, so it was pretty hard to hide. Hahaha.

Ouch.

We did make it to a temple. Took us about an hour and we're pretty sure that it wasn't the main temple we'd been hoping for. When we first arrived at the park, there was an impressive arch that we assumed was the entrance to the temple, but you had to pay to get in, and that just wasn't going to happen!

Enjoy the pics!