Driving in Korea!

Today has been an ILK (I love Korea) kind of day. I have the day off of school for Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival. My family and I will be leaving for my host grandparents house tomorrow and spent today getting ready for the festivities. Chuseok is the holiday when many Koreans exchange gifts the way many Americans do at Christmas. This week at school I got a really nice set of tea cups from my vice principal. My principal gave me a HUGE box of shampoo, conditioner, body wash, four bars of soap, a poof, and four tubes of green tea toothpaste. Young gave me a box of 200 individually wrapped orange flavored rice puffs. I also received a box set of wool socks from another teacher at school.

I woke up this morning and at breakfast I asked if there was anything that I could do to help prepare for Chuseok this weekend. I thought that maybe I could help Elijah cook or make a trip to the supermarket to pick up some treats for the kids. My offer was received with a great smile from Mark and he said that it would be a great help if I would drive Elijah around to drop of presents to her friends for Chuseok and take her and Heewon to Emart. I was unaware that my host mother did not drive, but Mark knew that I have an international drivers license and this plan was perfect. The driving laws in Korea are all the same at home, but Koreans follow the laws only about 50% of the time. Needless to say I was pretty nervous about driving around and being directed in only Korean, because my host mother does not speak English.

Everything turned out OK and I was very thankful that I have studied so hard in Korean. We laughed a lot about how easily we communicated and how scared Elijah got when I would pull of behind cars and not break as quickly as she would have liked. We were a team; Elijah read the Korean signs and abbreviated them into short Korean phrases that I was familiar with. It had been a long time since I had driven a car at all and years since I had driven such a boat of a car. Thank goodness for my practice driving Poppa's cars years ago.

We drove to Emart and browsed isles of box gifts sets for Chuseok. The sets included matching couple socks, spam (slogan: Spam makes you smile), vitamins and every type of body lotion and wash you could imagine. I hung out in the aisles with dried squid while she ran around in the masses of people picking up various ingredients for our weekend. Based on our shopping trip, I am both excited and nervous about what I might be putting into my mouth this weekend. I am also looking forward to seeing all of the gifts exchanged, because they are not things that I would ever dream of exchanging with such pride.

I think that this will be an "only in Korea" weekend!