Teachers Share their Experiences While Living Abroad!

Seollal, or Lunar New Year, is one of the holidays celebrated in South Korea, along with other countries like Japan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and places with a large Chinese diasporic population. In South Korea, it is one of the most important holidays of the year, in which loved ones congregate in festivities that can last for three days. People travel far and wide to spend time with family, dress up in hanbok, the traditional garb, and perform rituals of filial piety and ancestral worship. They play folk games and eat traditional foods like tteok, rice cake, and jeon, savory pancakes.

You know about the BIG holidays in Korea, such as Chuseok, and Seollal. But there are a lot of other holidays that are a big part of life here. Usually, Koreans work very hard. They study hard, they work long hours at work. So, that means that when they get free time, they use it to the best of their ability. This leads to some really culturally enriched holidays that are relatively new. They are important for the younger generations, and people are getting into them more and more with each passing year. For example, Christmas used to be seen as only a religious holiday for Christians, and then a couple's holiday. But these days it has become more accepted as a much larger holiday. The same goes for Halloween. Before, only foreigners used to celebrate Halloween. However, now it is becoming a much more significant part of Korean culture. Like these two, there are a variety of interesting and unique holidays, and also some variations that you should know before coming to Korea.

Living and teaching in Korea is all about what you make of it and who you spend your time with and events at work are a great way to create memories when you are far away from home.

At Chungdahm Learning you have the opportunity to work with people from all over the world, so it is possible to challenge yourself to experience new things, cultures and grow as an individual. Being able to socialize with people from diverse backgrounds has been my favorite part of teaching abroad, so I recommend you do your best to plan events within your academy where you can build bonds with your fellow teachers outside of the classroom. In this blog I will talk about some of the events my fellow teachers and I have done at ChungDahm's Songpa branch. 

This year all Chungdahm locations will be closed next week for two days to observe the Chuseok holiday.  Chuseok is the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving and depending on your branch, you might be lucky enough to get a few extra days off before and after the vacation. At Songpa branch, where I work, instructors were excited to hear about the schedule changes that will allow for a few extra days of relaxation!

Happy New Year from South Korea!  Despite not being a night creature, the motifs have always appealed to me, and Korea delivers. The liveliness, the nonsense, the spectacular karaoke called norebang, the palm-readers, the game rooms or PC Bangs—the possibilities are limitless. But what can I say: even with all the excitement, I enjoy earlier evenings. However, to welcome and further solidify my coming year living and teaching in Korea, I decided I was going to honor New Year’s Eve as truly as possible.

Annually Koreans celebrate their New Year, Seollal. The holiday falls on different days each year. This year the holiday is being held over January 27-29. The period is decided according to the Lunar Calender.

Seollal and Chuseok are two of the biggest holidays in Korea where millions of Koreans take time off to travel to their home cities to spend time with their families. The Western equivalent would be Thanksgiving and Christmas. Seollal is very traditional with various associated foods and activities. Our students usually get money from their parents, aunts and uncles and Koreans festively say  to one another 새해 복 많이 받으세요 (sae hae bok manhi bah doo seh yo) – which means “Happy Seollal.”   This blog will help explain the customs and traditions of Seollal, so you will have a better understanding of the holiday when you are teaching in Korea.

You will find celebrating Christmas while teaching in Korea to be very unique. Although you will hear a lot of Christmas music, see trees and building lit up, and people dressed in Santa suits, it still doesn't always feel like the Christmas season you are used to back home. In this blog I will do my best to give you tips on how to celebrate the holidays at ChungDahm, with your fellow teachers and expats in Korea and even your family back home.

One of my favorite holidays back in America was the 4th of July. Thanks to Facebook’s memory reminders, I realized how much I was able to travel during those long holiday weekends. Although I wasn’t able to travel far from Seoul, I was able to do some fun activities to celebrate this holiday.

Korean New Year, also known as Seollal or Lunar New Year, occurred this past week! It was celebrated from Sunday, February 7^th to Wednesday, February 10^th, departing from the year of the ram and entering the year of the monkey. People associate the year of the monkey with joyfulness, playfulness and some consider it the year of the fool. Lunar New Year falls on day of the second moon after winter solstice. It is one of the most significant traditional Korean holidays. All citizens get time off work, or school to be with family, enjoy tteokguk (a traditional rice cake soup enjoyed especially at Lunar New Year) and honor past ancestors. More recently, Korean’s have used the holiday to travel to distant family, so it is often the most expensive time of the year to book any form of transportation.

Like many expats teaching in Korea, I assumed Christmas was going to be one big let down. That is to say, extremely sad and depressing, as I believed nothing could compare to Christmas at home in Canada with my family. Although celebrating Christmas in Korea was not the same, it also provided the opportunity to celebrate the holiday with my fellow ChungDahm teachers in different ways than I I had before.