Happy Chuseok!

Today was the big day: the long-awaited visit to the Kims' residence to celebrate the Chuseok holiday with their extended family and several of my colleagues from school.  The Kim residence turned out to be an apartment on the 15th floor of a building which is part of a complex of high-rises similar to many I see around here and Chuseok turned out to be only somewhat related to our Thanksgiving (which I'd been led to believe) but it was a really interesting, delicious, and fun time regardless of expectations or definitions.

Six of us left here about 8:00 and walked to our local subway stop where we caught a train to the subway stop (Haengsin) nearest the Kim residence.  On the way we were joined by a 7th CDS teacher, Samuel Tolley, who teaches music and was coming from Seoul (not pictured).

L. to R: Eric, Aaron, Rebecca, Madeleine, Peter.  Aaron and Rebecca are married as are Peter and Madeleine.  Everyone is a teacher at CDS except Rebecca.  Everyone except Eric is in their first year at CDS like me.  Madeleine and Rebecca had brought cookies as a gift and I had hoped to find some sort of gift basket on the way but was unable to complete that mission.

Mr. Kim and his eldest brother, who was actually our host, met us at the Haengsin station and drove us a short distance to their apartment building.  Maybe it was a condo.  I guess the difference doesn't matter.  There we were greeted by the extended family which included Mr. Kim's uncles and brothers (who are older than him) and 1 or 2 of his sisters (? to tell you the truth I kind of lost track) and their wives and kids and some cousins.  As soon as we got there we all stood around and Mr. Kim formally  introduced everyone. There was already a nice spread of food set up at one end of the dining room and after the introductions Mr. Kim explained they were going to do a little ceremony where they read a letter (I think that's what he said, though it seemed more like making a little speech to me.  Come to think of it I don't even know if it was out loud) in honor of their ancestors, both patriarchal and matriarchal, going back 3 generations.  I'm not quite sure if all those ancestors were included in the letter/thanks or only the most recent ones.  Mr. Kim explained that since his father had passed on (5 years ago), his oldest uncle was now the one in charge so he's the one who made the first speech.  Part of this involved preparing food for the ancestors, which included bowls of rice and some poured beverage (tea?) and inviting them to eat.  Incense was wafting because (as Mr. Kim explained) the smoke helped convey the messages upwards to where the ancestors now dwelt.  Mr. Kim made it a bit personal by explaining that his mother had died 23 years ago when he was 16 and his father had lived alone for nearly 20 years after that while this fact had made him (Mr. Kim) more independent he now felt some guilt about not recognizing how lonely his father's life had been after his wife died.  According to Mr. Kim his father's dying words to him had been to maintain and nurture his friendships and that's what he was doing by inviting us westerners to celebrate Chuseok with him and his family.

Our host, Mr. Kim's oldest brother (of course, they're all named Mr. Kim!) making the first speech/prayer/letter/offering?

My Mr. Kim with his son Austin

Unfortunately I forgot who all was related to whom.

I think different patriarchs from each branch of the family offered different speeches/letters (possibly do different sets of ancestors?  I'm making this up now) but I do know that a similar ritual occurred several times with different groups of the extended family each time.  The ending of each repetition included a "big bow" (according to Mr. Kim) which is "two and a half bows" meaning two times going all the way down on your knees and bowing then up again and bow from the waist (that last one's the half bow).  

Part of the ritual involved circling a pot of tea (?) around the smoking incense 3 times and then pouring three portions of tea into the ancestor's cup and placing it next to their previously prepared bowl of rice (with spoon left sticking out, which is only done at this time).  I may be making some of this up but that's what I thought I was seeing from my vantage point at the back of the room.

Meanwhile I'm looking around for things to take pictures of (after having already asked Mr. Kim if it was okay to take pictures and being heartily encouraged to do so) and so this is the part of the kitchen that was behind me.

And these are my fellow teachers observing.

And these were some cool jars of something in some liquid on the table next to me.  Could the one on the right be ginseng?

And here's a view of another part of the kitchen.  Even though I was told that everyone had contributed to making the food I suspect Chuseok and Thanksgiving have something in common in that the women usually do most of the cooking and cleaning!  But again, I could be totally wrong about that.  I did see one of the sons helping with the dishes later on.

Eventually we teachers were invited to participate in the ceremony and circle the pot of tea around the pot or incense and pour it out three times into a cup or something but it involved an extended time kneeling on the hard wooden floor then walking on your knees up to the front when it was your turn to do the ritual then knee-walking back to your place and waiting for everyone else to finish and I bailed.  I don't know how they could all be on their knees on that wooden floor so long, much less walk around on their knees on it!  Sorry Grandpa Buzz, Grandma Jean, and Grandma Dorothy!

The bowls in back are for the ancestors.

The little reddish cups (is that what they'd been pouring?) just in front of the bowls had a traditional Korean drink (according to Mr. Kim) which isn't the regular Makeoli or Soju but an older, purer form, supposedly.  It tasted like the regular soju to me though, when Eric and I got to share one of them.

Mr. Kim was helpfully explaining everything that was going on the whole time we were there.

Next they started rearranging the tables so we could all sit down and eat.  I guess this was the Thanksgiving-like part.

In case you hadn't noticed, there's a lot of really interesting and delicious-looking food we're going to get to sample!

It took a little while to get the tables and place settings squared away and all the dishes set out on the tables so I took a couple more pics looking around while that was going on.

View from the condo.  This is looking roughly southwest, toward the Han river and in the general direction of our school.

I noticed some nice potted plants.

Getting things ready for the eating!

Thankfully, sitting on your butt instead of your knees is allowed.

Soon!

Somehow I ended up at the head of my table.

Starting to serve ourselves without further ceremony.

This blurry photo is of the dish I chose to try to remember the name of.  In true teacher fashion Mr. Kim tasked all of us, his students, with the goal of learning the name of one dish (but it had to be a different dish for each of us!) and we had to learn it from a different person at the gathering and we're supposed to tell it to him next time we meet for Korean lessons (which will be Monday for me).  In this I recognized a smooth teacher move for getting different people to talk to each other.  Anyway, I chose this one which turned out to be a kind of kimchi.  There were at least two kinds of kimchi today, a white one, whose name literally translates as "white kimchi" and this one, whose name is something like Yulmo kimchi and literally translates from the name of the plant which, according to Mr. Kim is not cabbage or spinach.  Unfortunately I typed it in my phone phonetically to help me remember the name and when I promptly forgot the name and went back to refresh my memory I noticed that my phone had auto-"corrected" it for me to "You'll kimchi".  Thanks a lot, autocorrect!  Now I don't know what it's called.

So we ate for a while and one by one they all finished and it was just me still serving myself and eating more and more and I got self conscious and pretended to be done though I could have gone on all afternoon.  It was varied and delicious!  Near the end they brought out a traditional sweet rice drink (unfermented, unfortunately) as well as some regional grapes and pears to finish things off.  But when we were done eating there was one more surprise!  One of the women works in Seoul in a shop that sells and rents the traditional garb called the hanbok which you see Mr. Kim and his kids and some of the women wearing in the pictures above.  It may be a fad in recent years or at least a tradition around this time of year but apparently you can rent them if you don't own them and then you get into places for free or at a discount or you get discounts when you're buying stuff during this holiday.  Anyway they thought it would be fun to dress the westerners up in hanboks so that's what they did!

Getting ready to try on hanboks!

There were two styles of hanbok for each the men and the women.  One style was "traditional" and one style was more modern.  This is actually the modern one.  Apparently the difference is not in how fancy it is but rather in how difficult it is to put on, though none of them struck me as that difficult.

Madeleine and Peter

Aaron and Rebecca

And Oh, did I mention the fans?  During this time all of us were presented with the gift of a fan.  The couples got fans with some couples theme on it (I missed exactly what)

Mine was the modern-style "simple" hanbok.  Mine had velcro.  This is me in the "fan closed" position.

And here I am posing with Eric in full-on-fan mode.  Us single guys got fans with a traditional song on them with a theme of missing someone who has traveled far away and hoping they'll come back soon, safe and sound.  I thought that was very poignant.

Thus ended the scheduled portion of our visit.  Our host had run off somewhere but Mr. Kim explained he'd asked us to stay until he returned to bid us goodbye so we hung around for a couple minutes taking selfies with the family until Mr. Kim's uncle, our host, returned with some leftovers (or something, I'm making this up again but I don't know why he'd had to leave if it was leftovers since all the leftovers were there in the condo) packed into the same tupperwear that Madeleine had brought the cookies in then thanked us for coming and sent us on our way.

If I may generalize grossly, Koreans really like to make peace signs in photos!  I wish I remembered these guys' names but I don't.  They actually approached me to take selfies with them originally, which we did on their phones.  When I did it with the guy I sort of riffed on the peace sign motif by giving him bunny ears.  Then I felt bad so I offered to do another one with him without the bunny ears and then I decided I should get one on my camera too.

Me and little Mr. Kim, aka Austin.  He was very friendly and inquisitive.  Invariably everyone wants to know how tall I am.  You can tell them I'm 191 cm if anyone asks.

So that, Dear Readers, was my Chuseok.  And how was yours?  I leave you tonight with these sounds from the greater Seoul-Incheon metropolitan area: