Ch-ch-chuseok!

It's going to be a quiet R&R Filled vacation for me. While the rest of the city floods out to the smaller towns in the countryside, I'm hibernating in my apartment, preparing for winter.

Chuseok is Korea's equivalent to Thanksgiving. We had an activity day for the kindy students on Tuesday. The students arrived wearing hanboks, the traditional Korean folk dress. These kids look so adorable and I must say, they have certainly upped the fashion factor of hanboks since I wore one when I was younger.Each classroom was assigned a certain activity. Stephanie taught them how to bow, Mike and Michael played games, Mindy made lanterns, and I taught the kids how to make songpyeong.

We had balls of rice cake (ttok) and a mixture of brown sugar and seasame seeds (kkeh). The kids would roll small balls of ttok and flatten them out. Next they would put a small spoonful of the kkeh and seal up the ttok to make the songpyong. Basically they're just sugar dumplings. This would seem rather simple but the ttok would get super duper sticky and I had a plaster of rice cake on my hands by the end of 5 classes coming through.

For the first few classes I tried to do my best in making authentic songpyeong. But by the end, I just threw the rules out the window and basically took off little chunks of ttok and dipped them into the kkeh mixture. One of the younger 6 year olds one upped me and just started eating the brown sugar/seasame seed mixture like it was cereal... I would let Stephanie handle his sugar frenzy later.

Our director also got presents for the teachers. These gift sets are pretty hilarious. They can range from Spam, to Shampoo/Bodywash, to tuna (says Mikey who received a nice tuna gift set from his school).

What could mine possibly be?

Are they trying to tell us something?