Happy Chuseok!

This weekend be will four days long thanks to Chuseok landing on  Monday.  Chuseok is a Korean equivalent of the American Thanksgiving.  People travel to their home towns, make songpyeon (a rice cake sweet), they bow to their ancestors, and sometimes they wear the traditional hanbok.  That's what we're all wearing in the picture below.  Also in the picture below is my preschool class!  Along with Ginny, my Korean partner teacher who was taking the picture, we are Elegance Class!

To celebrate Chuseok, all of the teachers wore hanbok for the morning preschool classes on Friday.  I showed one of the pictures to my older afternoon class, and they said my hanbok wasn't very pretty.  I tell you this not so I can let off steam about the little punks, but so that you can know that all hanboks aren't lime green and bright red and polyester.  I've already seen some that are quite gorgeous and not just because they can come in more pleasing colors.  The nicer and more expensive ones (like the one on the girl second from the right) can be made from fine silk, can have fine embroidery, and can have little shimmery butterfly appliques or rhinestones attached.  Some of the male teachers' hanboks had very ornate charm buttons that hung from their vests.

In addition to our fancy outfits, we played with a jegi which is like a fancy shuttle-cock-meets-hacky-sack.  We also had Korean wrestling competitions in the gym, we made Happy Chuseok cards for the kids' parents, we played musical chairs, and, when we ran out of things to do, I taught them the ever and always appropriate Macarena.  Ha!  I really did!

Happy Chuseok!