Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mindmetoo]

Chuseok is a holiday where Koreans all line up to pay their respects to their public transportation infrastructure. Some line up at bus stations or train stations. The well-heeled seem to pay their respects at airports or in individual mobile worship boxes called autos. Worshipers in their autos greet fellow worshipers with hand gestures, mouthed ritual blessings, and melodious trumpeting via air horns.

While the poor and lower middle classes seem to pay only an hour or so of respect at bus/train stations, the middle classed and rich seem to spend several hours in lines at airports or upon black, maze-like devotional paths called expressways. It is believed the rich spend this extra time to either atone for their greed or pay thanks for their good fortune.

To celebrate the fact their public transit infrastructure has, for another year, managed to just barely handle the crush of worshippers, Koreans give each other festively decorated boxes of Spam and hair conditioner.

Chuseok also seems to double as a female fertility ritual. Infertile females, the very young and the very old, are shrouded in colorful tent-like enclosures called hanboks. Fertile females wishing to signal they are no longer interested in engaging in mating because they have acquired a husband and given birth to at least one male child also don these hanboks to mimic infertility. It's not known if these married women willingly adopt this symbolic infertility or if they do it at the behest of a local Chuseok high priestess called a Mother in Law.

Those wishing to still mate and produce viable male offspring seem to avoid being fitted into a hanbok, preferring to dawn tight dark sheaths called a Little Black Dress.

[Real Reality]

A car trip from Seoul to Daejeon over Chuseok is expected to take five hours and 10 minutes, from Seoul to Busan, 10 hours, and from Seoul to Gwangju, eight hours. More than 21 million cars are expected on the highways over the holiday.
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/200409/17/200409172302097579900090409041.html

[Ya-ta Boy]

I'm waiting for the day when one accident at a key intersection brings the whole transportation system into full-scale gridlock and everyone has to abandon the car.

In the meantime, I will have to be content with another front page picture of the mass of cars leaving Seoul.

[tomato]

Good job, Mind Me Too!

You must be an imaginative writer!
Just one word of criticism, though: you left out the cemetery visits, which are a very important part of Chuseok. Can you think of some way that a space alien could misinterpret the cemetery visits?

[just because]

[mindmetoo]

[the eye]

clever you, mindmetoo!!

[coolsage]

The good news for us waygook: five days off. Stock up on food and beverages, kick back, watch some movies. No classes. Yes!

[mindmetoo]

[captain kirk]

'...shrouded in colourful, tent-like structures called hanbok'.
Ah, I see you have a taste for the ladies you horndog alien you!

[mindmetoo]

*bump*

I saw my first newspaper photo of this chuseok season of someone wrapping a group of foreign women in hanboks...

[blunder1983]

I'm confused, how long is Chuseok? I thought it was sat-mon next week. Am I wrong?

Also what IS it celebrating? I prefer showing ignorance here than at school.

[uberscheisse]

[nev]

[jaganath69]

Thank Gawd I'll be out of the country for this one too. Managed to avoid all bar one since I have been here.