Chuseok

Woke Sunday morning to deathly quiet - a rare event in Korea. Walking to the station my local market appeared completely deserted. Normally it is jammed with people.








Another thing was different - many people were wearing hanbok, traditional Korean clothes - like this little girl playing in a carpark. It was Chuseok... my fourth Chuseok in Korea.







Chuseok is one of the busiest days in the Korean year. It is a harvest thanksgiving day, when Korean people thank their ancestors for, well, everything. I headed bush with one of my students, Arthur, a Russian teenager studying in Korea. We walked along the main ridge of Mt Geumjeong, which runs down the middle of Busan. It was a great day as there were very few people on the mountain. It was SO GOOD to get out of the city and smell the air among the trees...



We met a pair of Korean men who shared their picnic lunch with us. They generously gave us fruit, cakes, eggs and makkoli (korean liquor) and we ate our fill.






Our walk ended here at Beomeosa - one of the oldest temples in Busan. We took a bus from here back to "civilisation".






After the walk, we saw a crowd of people walking up a road. The road was lined with people selling flowers. From a distance the flowers looked beautiful so we went to look more closely. Unfortunately they were artificial flowers. Hmmmm.... so many things here are like that.. It seemed there was some sort of festival going on so we followed the crowd. I was a bit perplexed to see people selling sickles and other cutting implements... were people going to some sort of battle?






When we got there we saw the reason. The road led to a public cemetery, where people were tending the graves of their ancestors. The sickles are for cutting the grass. Some graves are well-kempt, the grass cut short. Others, whose descendents are no doubt poverty stricken and hungry now, have long grass growing on them. After cleaning the graves, people perform a ceremony and bow to them.


I think we can be forgiven for thinking it was a festival as there were people selling balloons and snacks. I bought two Sponge-Bob balloons and called Jung-sook, asking her to bring her two nieces to the MacDonalds nearby. There we ate chips, soft-serves and admired Spongebob's squarepantsy glory. ^___^