Chu-seok at WEL

This weekend is Chu-seok in Korea, their biggest holiday, apparently a little like Thanksgiving. Everybody goes home to gather with their families, prepare a traditional feast and play some crazy games. This week we had a special day to celebrate at WEL school. All the kids and most of the teachers dressed in their hanboks, which was quite amazing to see.

Grace with Lily and David, our youngest students

Olivia and Abigail

Raina taking the kids in some special dances

One of my Korean coworkers was very kind and gave me her hanbok to wear for part of the day, it was very pretty and floaty but surprisingly hot!

Me in hanbok with Erica



Sara and I in our borrowed hanboks

The WEL waegooks (foreigners), Byron, Sara, me and Carp

After making song-pyeon, traditional glutenous rice cakes filled with sesame (I loved making them, but not so much eating them), the kids had fun with a tournament of Korean sumo wrestling, where they wear scarves around their middles and hold on to each other and have to use all their force to push the other to the ground - very funny to watch.

Julie gets into some traditional Korean style sumo wrestling

Anne, Joey and Rosie watch on

After that the real fun began - a very Korean game where you hop around on one leg, holding the other, trying make the other contestant make their leg fall to the ground first

Olivia hopping along

Then it was outside for a photoshoot:

Venus class - finding the idea of looking and smiling at the

camera a very difficult task

Much better! William, Olivia, Abigail and Julie

David, Kevin and Joshua, our babies, with Sue

Lovely Janice teacher, who lent me her hanbok with her

son Kai (in my class) who was not thrilled at his photo taken

Was a lot of fun, really neat to see everyone so beautifully dressed and to get a little slice of Korean traditional culture.

MEANWHILE - for Chuseok, we're off to JAPAN! We leave tomorrow and are so excited to see Tokyo. So the next post will surely be of that!