Happy Chuseok, ppls.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is one of the biggest holidays in Korea - Chuseok, which has been described to me as the Korean Thanksgiving. Though I'm sure the people who have told me so aren't aware of the fucked-up, colonizing, "let's celebrate our wonderful relationship with the natives of North America who we cheated and destroyed in the past and cheat and ignore in the present!" sentiments that Thanksgiving inspires in the American mainstream.

What the two holidays do have in common is that they are harvest holidays, centered around the preparation and eating of huge amounts of traditional foods. For most Koreans, Chuseok also involves traveling to their hometown and decorating their family graves.

My female co-workers seem to be a conflicted jumble of excited expectation of the holiday, and stressed sighs over the "when will you marry?" questions the young&single teachers will face from their family, and over the long and hard work of preparing a large meal for the entire family that the older&married teachers will be expected to do, while men of all ages relax for the entire holiday.

"Chuseok is terrible for women," Park Mi-Ran told me yesterday (Thursday), and I didn't know how to respond.

All of that aside, what this means for me is that I am on a five-day holiday. No school today, Monday, or Tuesday. I'm staying in Seoul, at a bit of a loss as to what to do with myself, and mostly pleased about that fact. I know some people who are traveling during the holiday, but I don't feel ready to travel. I just got here! I need a rest, some processing time (translation: reading time). Today was a funny day. I've spent it vegetating, entirely. Tomorrow, I think I will try to walk the whole distance of Chonggyecheon, maybe do some reading or practice my Korean on the banks. Other goals this weekend include: 1. climb Kwanak-san, the mountain nearest my place, famous for being one of the toughest climbs in Seoul; 2. spend a long time in the Seoul Folk Flea Market; 3. get a bit ahead on my lesson planning; 4. read a damn book.

I haven't written in my journal since I got here. To an extent, I think this is due to lack of processing time (yes, I feel this way even now, long after the suffocating atmosphere of orientation. Things happen to me so fast; I feel the need to back away from it, but often don't feel like I have the time). The processing time I do have is often put towards this blog, which I don't resent, I think. But it is definitely strange; it means that I am working through my emotions and experiences entirely in a public forum, whereas normally I would be doing most of my processing privately in my journal.