Happy Chuseok

Aside from Korean New Year, this is my first big cultural holiday. Chuseok is a major holiday over here. It started as the harvest festival, when Koreans gave thanks for a bountiful harvest. Nowadays far more people live in cities than on farms, but many of the rituals are the same. Everyone goes to visit their families, dress in traditional costumes, eat huge meals, and tend to the graves of their ancestors. Americans here call it "Korean thanksgiving"

Chuseok to foreigners is a day off work (more if you don't work for the U.S. Government), lots and lots of traffic, and avoiding major grocery stores for a week. We didn't follow that last little bit of advice and ended up at a crazily crowded Home Plus with an inflated grocery bill. I guess stores over here jack up their prices for the holidays as well.

It's way too wet to go anywhere today, but as the grave tending starts about a week in advance, I did see some neat stuff. I found a variety of foods on graves, from glasses of makkoli to opened yogurt cups. I imagine the mountain wildlife loves Chuseok. New graves have also materialized in what I thought were patches of wildlife.

We're celebrating our day off by eating and watching House. The big plan was to make a Korean American feast, but I wasn't really in the mood for Korean when I started cooking, though I did add a buchingae (pancake).

Tomorrow, I start conducting interviews for my job opening. I have had more interviews than I can count, but I have always been on the other side of the desk. I'm pretty nervous about it. I have always viewed a job interview as a special form of torture, and now I'm the inquisitor. I know one thing—I won't be judging anyone by his or her clothing. I have always found it particularly asinine that someone interviewing for a $10 an hour shelving job has to shell out $100 bucks for a suit that they will never again wear to work.

Soup, buchingae, yogurt salad, and a chicken