chuseok

last thursday, another class of phonics was added to the school, so i got it. there are only two kids in the classroom (so far), but one of the kids is like five combined into one. yesterday i taught them the letter f. the most frustrating part of teaching phonics (or any of the kids, i guess) is their pronunciation. the korean language has a lot of "uhhh" and "eee" sounds in them, so the kids always add them to the end of a word. so when i was teaching them the word "fox" yesterday, they added an "uhh" to the end of it to make "foxuuuh". it's the most annoying thing to hear ever and the hardest thing to correct. i spent probably ten minutes with eight f words trying to make sure they wouldn't add anything to the end of it.

this past weekend was chuseok, a korean holiday, so we got a three day weekend!! i (along with a few other teachers) was invited to one of the korean teacher's house to celebrate. when we arrived, we helped him and his mom make songpyeon, a round rice cake with sesame and crushed red beans in the middle that you steam with pine needles. we watched his mom make the rice "dough" by adding rice powder and boiling water and mixing it together to get the right consistency. then you take a little of the rice, roll it into a ball and make it into a bowl-like shape so you can add the red beans. then you pinch the edges together so the red beans are in the center of the cake and roll it into a weird egg/ball shape with pinched ends. it's an old wives' tale that if you roll the cake perfectly, you will have beautiful babies.

when chuseok actually begins, the family sets out a table full of food on wooden platters. everything must be set in a certain order and there has to be an odd amount of food on every platter. for example, 1 fish was on a platter, 3 apples, and 15 chestnuts. they also put their spirital address for their family on the table so their ancestors know where to come. then the men (i think the women can too, but they were all preparing the meal for them after the ceremony, so they didn't participate) lit incense and poured some kind of hot alcoholic beverage in a cup, placed it next the spirital address and put chopsticks on two of the platters. they bowed (twice) and continued pouring more into the cup and moving the chopsticks around to various platters. after the ceremony, we ate a tofu soup, rice & kimchi (of course), and other foods that had been placed at the ancestors table, but only after it was all removed and put into normal serving plates.

the other day amber and i went to one of the restaurants around our apartments that serves spaghetti that is surprisingly really good. before when i have ordered this, i have just used my chopsticks to eat it, but they gave us forks. it was so strange, but the fork actually felt weird in my hand. 10 and 1/2 more months of eating food with chopsticks, but i'm actually already excited to get back to knives and forks. trying to cut food with chopsticks is difficult.