We Came to Korea for the Sushi!

The weekend of September 29th was the holiday of Chuseok which is Korean Thanksgiving.  It's celebrated in much the same way US Thanksgiving is celebrated - gluttony, putting the fun back in family dysfunction, and shopping.  

I was very lucky to have two great friends come and visit over Chuseok, Christy and Mentha. They have both been very supportive of my decision to move abroad, and even booked their flights to Korea before I had a flight to Korea (they were confident I'd show up, since I had already signed the contract).

Between Mentha and I, we took close to 1,000 pictures over the week.  I'm going to do my best to taper that down for ya'll.  ;)

I'm also going to break it down into multiple posts.  You'll thank me later.

The ladies arrived Saturday night.  They were my pack mules so we spent most of Saturday unpacking the goods.  I miss Trader Joe's - much to the chagrin of Christy, Mentha insisted on loading me up on TJ's must haves.

We spent Sunday wandering around Bundang and my neighborhood, Sunae-dong (dong = neighborhood).  

Our photos got mixed up, but Mentha gets photo credit for, I'm pretty sure, all of these photos.

Mentha and I along the river.

I know fish like I know trees and flowers [i.e. not at all], but these are huge and all over the river.

Of course, one of the first things they wanted to do was dive into a bowl of bibimbap or other Korean dish.  Unfortunately, Koreans don't mess around when it comes to celebrating a holiday.  Absolutely no Korean restaurants were open.  So, the next best thing and next closest neighbor...Japanese!

We had a fun time trying just about everything on the sushi boat.

Mentha is a wonderful photographer (and has a much nicer camera than I).  These are the kinds of things that, even after only three months (it feels longer), you don't notice as much anymore.  You go into resourceful/survival mode and manage around all these things.    Some things are translated into English (or English spellings, rather), but many signs are not.  

At the same time...I really need to put more time into Korean language studies. 

Next up, day 1 in Seoul!