This year, Chuseok weekend landed on Friday, September 13th. This holiday is also known as Korean Thanksgiving and it’s celebrated for three days. The day before was Thursday the 12th, and the day after was Saturday the 14th. Me and my friends used this four day weekend to check a few things off out “bucket list” of tourist attractions.
One of the first things we did was check out Gwangjang Market. This was recommended to us by one of our Korean friends that said it was a great place to shop around a bit and had a lot of great food options. Throughout the market there various Korean foods like mandu which are Korean dumplings. Plus fried chicken, bindae-tteok (Korean fried pancake), fishcake, gimbap (rice rolls, Korean sushi), and live squid! Although my friends and I were feeling adventurous, we weren’t feeling THAT adventurous. We decided to eat dumplings from Yoonsun Cho’s stand. You might recognize the name if you’ve watch Netflix’s Street Food. Yoonsun Cho and her famous dishes were featured for the episode that Netflix did regarding street food in Korea. And reputation upheld, her dumplings were delicious in flavor and as was her dumpling soup.
The next thing my friends and I did was visit the Sky Tower, or also known as Lotte World Tower. Now that I look back on it, its kind of funny. We thought that because it was a holiday weekend that this attraction was going to be relatively empty. Well after making some stops at arcade, shopping, and getting distracted immensely we finally found the line for the tower. Unfortunately, it was a two hour wait. Every foreigner must have thought what we thought and headed to the Tower on that weekend for the same reasons. So, my friends and I decided to actually go on the tower another time, and watch the view from the outside.
Chuseok weekend was unlike my other weekends. There was a lot packed into four days and come that Sunday I was exhausted. But, it was well worth it. It also started to rain a bit during this weekend, it made me smile and think of home.
Diana Naranjo