Celebrating the holidays 7,000 miles away from home was something Zee and I were a bit aprehensive about before moving to Korea. We are very close with our families, and we anticipated a lot of homesickness and "fomo" on those handful of special days throughout the year when we would normally be spending our time with them. However, we hadn't anticipated all the truly unique holiday experiences that come with living abroad.
Thanksgiving: I've mentioned a bit about our very first holiday in Korea in previous posts, but it was indeed a hard one. My birthday falls on Thanksgiving day every few years, and on those rare occasions it's especially exciting to reunite with extended family and friends, eat excessive food, and even get some gifts. This year however, even the small dinner we had got canceled due to a surprise Covid test required by my school on Thanksgiving day. You're not allowed to go anywhere after getting a PCR test, so we just had to hunker down and eat take-out chicken. Major bummer. Thankfully, we had planned a "friendsgiving" with our buddies the next day, so we were able to enjoy that particular feeling of togetherness that accompanies Thanksgiving. We were also to bring a bit a festivity to our classrooms by wearing turkey hats (which the students lost their minds over) and making the classic “hand turkeys” (which is not a trite activity here, so the kids all love the uniqueness of it).
Christmas Eve & Christmas Day: We've learned from a million Christmas movies that Santa delivers presents to children all over the world. But does he also deliver presents to mid-20s foreigners living in Korea? I like to think he does.
I was initally concerned that homesickness would hit me the hardest around Christmas, but luckily, we have wonderful family that is willing to coordinate FaceTime Christmas (Zee's mom even opened our stockings for us on video) as well as stellar friends here in S. Korea to celebrate with. We spent Christmas Eve eating duck (high reccommend) in santa hats with a couple friends and spent Christmas experiencing the Christmas nightlife in Gwangju with another pair of friends. I've never gotten to eat Mexican food and drink strange blue cocktails in bars on Christmas, so it was a unique experience to say the least.
Considering many Koreans don't celebrate Christmas, it‘s relatively easy to travel throughout the Christmas holidays, which creates opporunities for experiences you would never get in the west.
New Year's Eve: Now this one was special. After almost half a year in Korea, and we still hadn't been to Seoul. It's probably the only Korean city most people know, and all we knew of it was the views from our quarantine hotel. Trust me, that's not how we wanted to remember Seoul. So we made a resolution to visit the big city before the year ended. Can you tell we're procrastinators?
We arrived around 6 pm on New Year's Eve, equipped with 4-5 layers of clothing each to guard against the 15°F weather. With the current Covid restrictions, everything closes at 9pm, which meant we had just enough time to grab a burger and some drinks from a flamingo-themed bar before we were knocked back out into the cold with a whole 3 hours to kill until New Years. We wandered through streets filled with "late night" food vendors and earring stores, which for some reason are one of the only businesses allowed to be open past 9. We ended up hiking to the top of Namsan mountain and kicked off the new year drinking soju Zee had carried in his jacket pocket and looking out over Seoul's cityscape.
From what we gathered, a decent number of Koreans do celebrate the New Year similarly to how we do it over in the US (staying up until midnight, fireworks, no funny hats though). However, the Lunar New Year is more widely celebrated on this side of the world, so hitting up big cities that have more western influences is a must if you want to ring in the New Year the way you want to.
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