Chuseok in Uijeongbu

This past weekend was Chuseok holiday here in Korea, which is like their version of Thanksgiving. My students told me that most people travel home to be with their families, eat a lot, and worship their ancestors to thank them for the harvest or something. Because of the holiday, we had Monday off school, which is long enough to make me need to get away somewhere. On Friday my good friend Kim and I both realized we didn’t have any plans, but we couldn’t get ahold of each other until Saturday morning, when we decided I should leave right then and take the subway up to Uijeongbu for a few days. So I threw some things in my backpack, called the director’s son to find out where the train station was, and jumped on the subway. The funny thing about the “subway” here is that most of it is above ground, like a train, but it goes underground near downtown Seoul. It has a huge network of lines that go a couple hours away from Seoul in each direction, so I could take it from the town I live in to Uijeongbu, which is 3 hours away on the other side (northeast) of Seoul. I had to change trains a couple of times, and I was pretty proud of myself for traveling all the way there alone, especially considering I had never ridden public transportation before in Korea.
After arriving and hanging out for a while at Kim’s place, we had to turn around and get back on the subway- her roommates and friends had decided to go to Nowon, a nearby city, to explore and eat dinner, and we thought it would be fun to go along. The area we were in was really nice and built up, with some American restaurants, so after walking around, we had dinner at Fridays and dessert at Krispy Kreme. We split the meals since American food is so expensive but it was good for a change. Krispy Kreme has some really wacky flavored donuts here, like pistachio and ones with jello-stuff-like-balls on top.
On Sunday I went to church with Kim and then walked downtown to have lunch with some of her Korean and American friends from church. Uijeongbu is a pretty city very close to the mountains and the downtown area looked very developed. In the afternoon, I went with the same group to their pastor’s house for a Chuseok dinner they had instead of their evening service, and then watched a movie back at Kim’s place with her friends. She lives with 3 other people in a big apartment. It was really great to hang out with a different group of people besides the teachers here. And of course I loved seeing Kim again and being able to catch up. I like all the people in Pyeongtaek, but I get stir crazy if I am stuck in the same place for too long. I also met the Spanish teacher there, a Korean-American girl who was in Granada when I was in Sevilla, so we had a couple interesting conversations in Spanish. I couldn’t talk her into letting me steal one of their Spanish books though :^)
Monday morning Kim took me on a tour of her school where she teaches Kindergarten. It was pretty interesting to see another of the NICS schools. Their school has about 50 more students than ours does, so it is a lot more well off. Kim showed me these really cool white-board-looking-things they have that are really computer screens that you can use these electronic pens to write on or run a flipchart presentation or Powerpoint. I came back Monday afternoon, and the trains were packed with people the whole way. But I arrived home fine feeling just like I did when I came back from a random trip in Spain, both happy and tired, and with that same sore muscle in the middle of my stomach from carrying my backpack that means I had an adventure. :^) It has been really nice to have people I know here in Korea, especially while I am still getting used to things and before I know too many Korean people. Last Thursday I had dinner at the Spaulding’s house, and the Hawkins came down too. It’s so much fun to see them all here. So hi from everybody until next time!