My First Thanksgiving (in Korea)

This is my first Thanksgiving in Korea. It was different celebrating it here. Since Korea doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, we worked on Thursday. It made it feel like it was just another day even though your head is telling you its a holiday. It was kinda of a strange feeling. I did talk to my family back home though. But we couldn't just let Thanksgiving pass by without celebrating in some way. So a group of us went to TGI Fridays. It guess that was as American as we could make it. It was a fun night.

But the Saturday after Thanksgiving was our real celebration. Our church had a big dinner for everyone in our English church. There are a lot of foreigners there and Koreans too. We even got to eat Turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and Popeyes mash potatoes and coslaw. There were even some Korean food like Kim-bop (which is rice and meat wrapped up in a seaweed) and spicy rice cakes. For dessert we had pumpkin pie, cheesecake, apple pie and lots of other stuff. There was so much food!!! But the fun thing was we ate with chopsticks. Let me tell you, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauces and coslaw were not made to be eaten with chopsticks.

Like I said before, there were lots of foreigners there. A few go the church but others were just invited but people from the church. We had Jenny and Robert's friends up from Daegu (which is about 2 1/2) hours away) there too. It was fun to get to meet fellow teachers and find out how long they had been in Korea and where they taught. There is something about being strangers in a foreign country that creates a comraderie. Its like we understand the frustrations and joys of living away from our home countries. We also have stories to share about things that have happened or humerous things kids say. It was nice to enjoy that company tonight.

I have to say that this felt more like Thanksgiving than the actually Thanskgiving day did. Our pastor even talked about doing a Christmas dinner for expats since this one went so well. We will have to see. But enough about holidays and food for now.