Last weekend we decided to break up the routine and venture out do something interesting. While we both agree that our jobs don’t really demand the kind of time and intellectual rigour we were used to in college,  it is a 9-5 job (or 10-6 to be more specific) and by the time the final bell rings we are usually too tired and hungry to do anything but head for home or to the nearest cheap restaurant with co-workers for dinner. So after 3½ weeks, I hadn’t been out of Suji and was desperately wanting to explore. Thus, we were happy to learn that Sunday, September 14th was a major holiday in Korea and we would have Monday off as a result.

Chuseok

All week, our coworkers had been telling us about Chuseok. Chuseok is a major harvest festival in Korea (their Thanksgiving), and is apparently better than Chinese New Year and even teacher’s day (which apparently is big here) when it comes to giving gifts to one’s teachers . Well that’s nice, we thought, but since we had only been here a few weeks, we didn’t expect much. Yet despite our newness, we were pleasantly surprised and touched when beautifully wrapped boxes and bags with little notes began to appear on our desks.

In total, we received expensive chocolates, a box of fancy cookies, a large chocolate cake, movie theatre gift certificates, several lotion gift sets,  a Costco-sized flat of purple Korean grapes, and something the other teachers said is probably one of the nicest gifts you can get in Korea (besides underwear): a jar of honey. Apparently, honey is very expensive and relatively rare because it has to be imported from Japan or something,  but this was not your ordinary bear-shaped jar of honey. No, this was an oil can sized jar—a lifetime supply of the sweet stuff that we have no idea what to do with. There is only so much you can do with honey—you can have it with bread and fruit and tea, right, but at that rate we’ll never be able to consume it all. So if you have any recipes that call for honey and not much else, let us know.

The gifts from our students were very much appreciated because even on Chuseok—a holiday with which we have no history and had never heard of just a few weeks ago—it was a little depressing to see families pile into cars packed with food and gifts and children, while we were left to watch the shops and restaurants close and the city empty out. All that chocolate and honey helped sooth our homesickness just a little. 

Yet, despite feeling left out of all the festivities, we decided to make the best of our long weekend and do a little exploring. 

Seoul

To celebrate the start of a long weekend, on Friday night we went out with some people from work. Our token British teacher—Lenny—had a friend in town for a visit so we met him and some of the other teachers at one of those wonderful, cheap restaurants that specialize in big communal vats full of spicy vegetables and meat grilled right in front of you. No one really knows exactly what it is that we ate, only that our coworkers have nicked named it Fire Chicken.

On Saturday, we wanted to try and ride the subway in to Seoul, but we started the day by taking the right bus the wrong way. Luckily, when we figured out our mistake and hopped off the bus, we found that we we outside a metro stop. Unluckily, we hadn’t realized that the subway ride into Seoul takes for-ev-er. Yet, we finally made it to Seoul just in time to visit Gyeongbokgung Palace before it closed for the day. The palace grounds were beautiful in the waning sunlight and lying in the protective shadow of the mountains. We walked around for awhile and admired all the kids dressed up in their Chuseok outfits. When the palace began to clear out for the night, we hopped back on the subway and somehow eventually found ourselves in Myong-dong, a very busy shopping district with bright lights and narrow streets. We didn’t buy much, except for some barbecue pork on a stick and some super-crunchy sweet potato fries with sugar from a couple of street vendors. Later we had a proper Korean dinner at some place in an alley that we will probably never be able to find again in a million years. We couldn’t really understand the menu, so we pointed to a picture and they brought us each one small ceramic pot full of a sweet onion soup loaded with meat and veggies. It was probably the first meal we’ve had in Korea that wasn’t spicy, which is appropriate because on Chuseok, red pepper—an important part of almost every Korean dish—is left out of food. It scares the ancestors away.

Sunday was a lazy day and by the time we pulled ourselves together it was already dinner time. We avoided the subway this time and hopped on the bus headed for Itaewon. Known as the “foreigner” district in Seoul, I had read several websites online warning against Itaewon if you wanted an “authentic” Korean experience (whatever that is). When we got there though, I was pleasantly surprised to find that “foreigner” was not synonymous with “American” or even “Western” as it so often is here. Instead, we found a balanced mixture of Indian, African, Middle Eastern and Western shops, restaurants, and people. At the “Foreign Foods” store, for example, we found Ocean Spray cranberry juice next to spice packets from Bangladesh and frozen vegetables from Israel. I have to admit, it was a nice break from the unrelenting homogeneity one finds everywhere else.

For dinner, Greg took me to an Indian restaurant he had patronized the previous weekend with some of the guys from work. It was expensive but the food was delicious and the staff was quite friendly. When we stopped to check and see if we had taken enough cash from our stash at home, the manager/waiter waved it away and told us not to worry if we didn’t have enough…we would pay next time. After dinner we wandered around Itaewon, met a friendly face in maize and blue down in the subway, gazed at the Chuseok harvest moon for a while and headed back home.

On our last day off,  we got up a bit earlier than usual and rode the 5500 bus back into Seoul. We decided to brave the Chuseok crowds, the heat, and the hills to get a better view of the city from the highest point possible. Once at the top of N Seoul Tower we were awed by the vastness of the city and shocked by its smog. You really can’t see how bad it is from street level, but we were afraid we might have a slight case of black lung after just a few days in Seoul. Once we got our feet back on the ground we walked around the the hill neighborhoods a bit more, hunted down the enshrouded Namdaemun gate (which was badly damaged in a fire this year) and returned to Suji to prepare ourselves for another week at work.