Chuseok

Happy Chuseok everyone!! Today is Korean Thanksgiving, and what a wonderful day it was. I made some new friends, saw some awesome places, and generally had a great day. So let me tell you about it.

Started off by meeting Kristin, who I had met through couchsurfing, at a subway station with two of her friends, Erin and Casey. We then ventured into downtown Seoul for some Chuseok festivities. We went to a great big palace, apparently the biggest one in Seoul. It was beautiful, lots of stone carvings and gorgeous buildings. Erin had been there before so she told us a little about the place, I guess the original was built around the 1300s, but then the Japanese razed it to the ground in the 1700s, and it was rebuilt around then to look exactly the same.

We wandered around the grounds for a while, finally making it up to the Korean folk museum. In the area around it there were lots of activities going on, fan and mask painting, games and stuff for kids. Kristin and Erin painted themselves some fans while I wandered around and ate cotton candy. After we were done there we walked out a different entrance and moseyed down the street. We saw a guy who was making candy on the sidewalk, it was really cool. He basically just poured some sugar into a ladle and heated it over a flame, stirring it until it caramelized. Then he put the glob down onto a surface, stamped it flat, and cut shapes out of it. A Korean guy who was watching with his daughter was kind enough to tell us about it, he said that it was very popular back in the 70s, when he was young.

We walked around a bit more after that, ending up at a pretty cool music exhibition on the street. It was traditional Korean music, but preformed by young people all dressed very modern. The instruments were all sitar looking things, but not really. It was like a third of a tree trunk, six feet long, with twenty or so strings on it, that they were playing sitting down. There were about a dozen of these on stage all played by women, with a guy singing with three girl backup singers. Tough to explain but pretty cool, I'll try to get the video I took on here.

We walked a little more and came on a stage with a Korean rock band playing. Hard rock, enjoyable, good energy. Erin asked the guy standing next to us (in Korean) if he knew who the band was, and he replied (in English) 'I don't know, but they're good!" Then we walked down the river and saw people making paper lanterns with candles in them to send afloat. There was a general party atmosphere in the city and everyone was having a good time.

We found a Vietnamese restaurant to eat at and get off our feet for a while. After that we decided it was about time to head back home, I have to take a bus from the subway station to get back to Hanam and I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to be stranded in Gangdong and forced to take a taxi. So all in all, a pretty excellent day. I tried to get some pictures on here but it wasn't really working, so I put them all on facebook if you want to check them out. I'll try to get a video up here too, but it's not really working right now either.

As always I hope everyone is doing awesome things, peace out players!