Happy Chuseok!

We just had a great holiday over here in Korea.  Its called "Chuseok" and its basically Korea's Thanksgiving.  To celebrate the harvest, Koreans go back to their hometown and visit their ancestor's tombs.  The graves here are mounded up and on hillsides, so people go out in the morning and clean off the mound of their parents or grandparents, and so on.  Then they go back home and have a big meal.  The cities feel almost deserted when everyone leaves because most people came from somewhere outside the city.  We heard the traffic jams were brutal. 
For our Chuseok, we slept in and ate a lot of food.  Koreans feel sorry for the foreigners who can't go back to thier hometown, and most of the restaurants close for the holiday.  Therefore, lots of people feed foreigners on Chuseok.  We had lunch on Saturday with the former provost of KAIST who gave us pizza (with real cheese and no corn or sweet potatoes!) and a bag of Chuseok goodies.  The traditional food of Chuseok is "dok."  This just means its some concoction of rice flour and sugar.  They also eat a lot of fruit (their traditional dessert, very healthy but it makes me miss chocolate sometimes).  We are still eating on it!
Sunday we always are fed by our church, so it was the usual feeding.  It was very empty since all the koreans were gone, but our english service was normal.  I will dedicate a post soon on our church and church activities (we are already very involved!). 
Monday we were feed lunch by a very nice pizza lady who didn't want the foreigners to starve.  She even turned away Koreans to only feed foreigners.  Then we had a surprise invitation to dinner by one of our Korean friends.  He invited 6 of us to his home where his mom cooked us supper.  It was soooo good!  She cooked some sort of stew that tasted just like potroast!  She also had tofu wrapped in bacon!!  It tasted just like bacon and eggs.  There was fish and kimchi and fried vegetables in egg!  You may just have to look at the pictures because it was all amazing. 

Korean Chuseok Meal

After dinner we went to a Nori Bang.  Its karaoke in a private room with just your friends.  It was pretty neat.  They had a bunch of songs, even in english!  Riley and I discovered that the songs we like the most are really hard to sing.
Monday was the real Chuseok, but our church had a Chuseok dinner for foreigners on Tuesday.  We had a sort bible study and went to a HUGE apartment of an older couple from our church.  It even had a bathtub!  Of course, in america it would be a normal-sized home, but for Korea it was large. She had a normal sized oven too!  We brought winter squash with brown sugar and cinnamon.  A guy from Colorado made lasangna (gooood lasagna), and a girl from south Africa make shepard's pie.  there was rice, kimchi soup, and, surprise, kimchi. One of the best parts what making a type of dok called "sampyong." We started with the dough that felt like crumbly paydough, then we made little balls, filled them with a mixture of sesame seeds and brown sugar, and pinched them closed.  Then they were steamed over pine needles to help them not stick and to give flavor.  They were good!  After dinner was fruit, cheesecake (chesa-caku in korean), and singing.