Week 4 in Korea - Chuseok
South Korea ·This past week started off with Chuseok, which is the Korean version of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Known to the west as Korean Thanksgiving, it is one of the two major holidays in Korea, with the other one being the Lunar New Year. This meant that Monday to Wednesday was a countrywide break, so I had no classes starting off the week. The official date for Chuseok is 9/17, which lies on a Tuesday. During Chuseok, Koreans traditionally eat Songpyeon, which are small glutinous rice cakes filled with different fillings, such as red bean, sesame seeds, or chestnuts. The shape of the Songpyeon is supposed to look like a half-moon, which is supposed to represent prosperity and hope for the future. To be honest, I don’t really like Songpyeon, since I don’t like anything made with glutinous rice flour usually, but I still ate some as part of the culture for Chuseok. It looked so hard to find mooncakes to celebrate Chuseok the Chinese way, but they were just nonexistent in Korea, even in foreign supermarkets I traveled half an hour to get to. Instead, the closest thing that I found was a flat pastry with red bean filling inside, but the box said mooncake in Chinese on the side, so that was what I settled with. However, the “mooncake” turned out to be so dry and flaky that I stopped eating after forcing down half of one. Comparing Chuseok and the Mid-Autumn Festival, I think the Chinese gain the upper hand on this one. We have a cool story (Chang’e and Hou Yi), mooncakes, and lanterns. However, Chuseok was really fun, and I really enjoyed celebrating it, hanging out with friends, and doing things aligned with Korean culture. One last thing I thought was really interesting was how the weather flipped a complete 180 degrees during this week. In the span of three days, the weather went from mid 90s to now low 70s, and you can see more people wearing sweaters now. This is my first time experiencing actual seasons, so I found this really amusing.
The day after Chuseok, I went to explore different parts of Seoul. First, I went to Deoksugung Palace, one of the five grand palaces in Seoul built during the Joseon Dynasty. The palace was pretty cool. Then, I went to the Lotte Malls in Myeongdong to do some shopping, where I also ate the worst noodles I ever had. The broth tasted like ocean water, and the noodles were undercooked. Then, I went to Namsangol Hanok Village, which was holding a Chuseok festival celebration, so I was able to play traditional Korean Chuseok games, see more Hanoks, and see a time-capsule that will be opened in 400 years. Then, we took the cable car up to N Seoul Tower to view the sunset, and we also went up the tower to the observatory deck to view night time Seoul, which was cool to see. To end off the day, we had dinner in Myeongdong, where we also did some shopping, until a huge rain spawned out of nowhere and we decided to go home early. I’ll put pictures at the bottom of the blog!
I am also starting to get more into F1, so when there is a race I would go to an American sports bar in Sinchon and watch the race. I love how lively and energetic everyone is, and it was just a fun environment to be in. People were cheering every time an overtake happened, and when two drivers crashed in Azerbaijan, people got even more spirited. The majority of the bar is Ferrari fans, and it seems like no one likes Max Verstappen or Red Bull. The next race is at 4am in Korea, so I might not go to that one, but we’ll see. I also learned some new submissions and sweeps from closed guard in BJJ this week. I used to not like closed guard before, but it is slowly starting to become one of my more favored positions. One good thing about doing jiu-jitsu in Korea is that I am grappling with people who are more similar in size than me, as compared to San Jose where everyone was much bigger than me.
Probably the most fun event this week is the Yonsei-Korea Joint Cheering Event, which is where Yonsei University students and our rival Korea University come together to learn each school’s cheering song. New cheers are also introduced during this time. Basically, it was a three and a half hour event where everyone would be cheering, singing, and dancing along to whatever was going on on stage. Yonsei and Korea University would take turns doing their cheers, and it was just a really fun time. It was also raining super heavily during the whole event, and they were handing out blue ponchos to everyone. The Yonsei Outdoor Amphitheater filled up quickly, and I also quickly realized that the poncho didn’t do too much, so I got soaked quickly as well. This cheering event is also supposed to prepare the two schools for the Yonsei-Korea Games, an annual event between the two schools where they go head to head in soccer, rugby, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. I am looking forward to going to some of these games this coming week :D.
Here are some pictures:
