In Korea, one of the biggest holidays of the year is Chuseok. While it is commonly called “Korean Thanksgiving”, the holidays don’t have anything in common; both origin and celebration are significantly different. Chuseok is a mid-autumn harvest festival period that aligns on a full moon day. To celebrate a good harvest, it is tradition to visit ancestral hometowns and feast on traditional Korean food such as yakgwa, Korean pear, and rice wine. While not as common now, Korean people wear traditional Korean clothing called hanbok. The two biggest events during Chuseok are to do ancestor memorial services at home and to visit the ancestral graves where family members will clean up their family’s graves. At the graves, meals are placed as offerings to the ancestors. For Chuseok many places close, including schools, banks, post offices, government buildings, stores, and some restaurants.
For Chuseok, I spent 4 days with some of my family members and relaxed. The family I spent time with doesn’t do the ancestor traditions due to the fact that it takes a lot of time and is not very fun, especially for kids. One day I learned how to make a traditional Korean bean paste dessert; that was fun and relaxing. Honestly, they do not taste all that great, but they are super cute decorations.
I was able to go on a school-sponsored weekend trip to Pompei, the Sorrento Coast, and a nice visit to the island city of Capri. This is covering the first day of my three-day, two-night trip.
To start off, I had to wake up early to meet at Piazza Trilussa at 8:30 AM to get on the 4-hour bus ride to start the weekend off with a visit to Pompei. It was a surreal experience walking through the preserved city. It was essentially the same size as some of the other cities I’ve visited but yet it was literally a ghost town lost to time. Our tour guide would point out the markets and the food stalls that used to line the streets, as we walked on the walking stones that would allow room for the carriages and the horses to do their business without causing the citizens to step on the horse’s personal business. We walked through a few houses and were able to get an amazing view of the city of Pompei from on top of a hill made to allow archeologists to survey the land as they unearthed more and more structures. It provided such a wonderful view of the expanse of the city and really allowed you to just appreciate the decades of work people have put into slowly and carefully uncovering a city buried in ash and dust. After we were done exploring the ruins, we had a delicious lunch just outside before heading off to our next location.
We toured a small family-owned pasta-making business, Pasta Cuomo, in Gragnano. One of the owners, Alfonso Cuomo, was incredibly passionate about his craft because he had the chance to reopen and reinvent his family’s business that began in the 1820s. He told us about the way that the city was once built entirely around pasta and how so much of the current block that he resides on used to be a part of the larger structure to help make the pasta for the city. He showed us the way that they used to make pasta and how the old machines used to function and work together to provide the proper foundation needed for creating the pasta. He was a wonderful host, and his passion was very evident in every word he said. Their company also works as a cooking class, bistro, museum, and BNB. I highly recommend checking them out and maybe ordering some pasta from them to help support and maintain a family business that started in the 1820s.
Once we were done there, we arrived at the 4-star hotel that was booked for us and set our stuff down before eating a 3-course Italian meal paired with dessert and more bread than we could handle. The people at the hotel were truly kind and made sure that we had enough water and food to allow us to just relax before we got to rest before our day in Capri.
DU Abroad 