Hello and welcome to bonus episode number 159 of the Cubelips English podcast.
My name is Andrew.
I am your English study buddy and your host for today's episode.
I hope you're doing well.
Thank you for clicking play and joining me for this lesson.
Today, I'm going to tell you about how I spent last week, which was a very special week, here in Seoul Korea, where I live.
We had so many holidays, and because of that, I got up to some interesting things.
So I'm going to tell you that story in this week's episode.
Before I do, I want to let you know there's a free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary for everyone to accompany this episode.
So please check out those tools and because I made them for you so that you can improve your English fluency with them.
So please, please check them out.
The link to get them is in the description for this episode.
And if you are a Q-Lips member, then you can also get a comprehension quiz.
If you'd like to sign up and become a Q-Lips member yourself, then please just click the link in the description for this episode.
You can learn about all the tools and special learning materials and speaking classes and benefits and bonuses that you get as a member.
So just click the link, find out all the details and sign up and become a member today for an affordable price.
And of course, thank you to all the members out there for your support.
Guys, we really do appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
And I've got one little announcement for you before we get started with this week's story.
And that is that we're holding a Q-Loops meetup in Hamburg, Germany on October the 18th.
Now, unfortunately, I won't be able to go there.
It's a little bit too far from my home here in Seoul to go all the way over to Germany.
I would love to go, but it's just a little bit too far.
However, I know that we have many European listeners.
We have many German listeners.
Perhaps we even have some listeners in Hamburg.
So if you are one of these people who can go to Hamburg and it's not too inconvenient for you, then I would really encourage you to participate and join the meetup.
It's going to be a pretty casual affair, guys.
You're just going to hang out with some other people.
QLips listeners like yourself.
It's available and open to everyone.
You don't have to be a member, even if you're just a casual QLips listener.
You want to go out and meet some other listeners and chat a little bit in English.
Alina, our Discord moderator and our study guide writer, And what else does she do?
She hosts some of the small group speaking classes.
She's going to be there.
And some of our other members from our community from Europe are going to be there.
So I'll put the link to all of the details in the description for this episode.
And if you are in Europe and you got some time coming up on this Saturday, October the 18th, then why don't you join the meetup in Hamburg?
I think it's going to be a real good time.
And, with that being said, let's get into my story for this week everyone about how I spent the long, long holiday here in Korea over the last week.
Here we go.
Enjoy.
Today is an exciting day.
I'm super stoked because it's the first day of the ice hockey season, the NHL ice hockey season.
As a good Canadian, I of course love ice hockey.
It's one of my favorite sports and my favorite team is the Vancouver Canucks.
I've been a fan my whole life and the Canucks have been pretty terrible my whole life.
They've never won a championship.
So I'm trying to have some positive energy today. this season.
And I think this year will be our year.
This year we are going to win the championship 100%.
You heard it here first.
That is my official prediction.
I don't want to go in with a bunch of doom and gloom, like everybody else is, about this team this year.
So it's a long season.
There are 82 games and it's going to be an exciting season, I hope.
Anyways, I'm going to watch the game here in a little bit and go Canucks go for this season.
But I'm not going to talk to you about ice hockey today.
I've got a different story for you.
I'm going to tell you about the long long long, beautiful long holocaust that we just celebrated here in Korea.
In fact, we had two holidays, no, three holidays strung together.
We had a holiday on October the 3rd.
It was Korea's Foundation Day, Gaecheonjeol.
And then we had the weekend.
And then after that we had a three-day holiday called Chuseok, which is, like the Korean Thanksgiving, the autumn harvest festival.
You could think of it that way.
And then we also had On the Thursday, Hangulnal, which is the Hangul day.
Hangul is the Korean writing system.
You could think of it as like the Korean alphabet.
So they have a special public holiday just to celebrate their unique and really great writing system.
But today I'm going to talk about Chuseok.
As I mentioned, Chuseok is the Korean Thanksgiving, the harvest festival, and it happens.
I have a note here.
I'm going to read this.
I got this from ChatGPT.
Let me read what ChatGPT said.
The Chuseok holiday is a harvest festival celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar, not the solar calendar.
The lunar calendar.
And usually this is in September or early October.
Families gather together to honor their ancestors, share a big meal and to give thanks for the year's harvest.
So I'm going to tell you about the big meal.
I'm going to focus in on the big meal today, because my wife and I hosted a huge family dinner in our tiny home here in Seoul.
So when I say huge, we had eight people in total.
My wife and I were there, of course, but then also her parents, so my in-laws, and then her brother and his family.
So my brother-in-law, his wife, and their two children.
They have two boys that are like... middle school and elementary school aged.
And so we had the eight of us together.
And yeah, we invited everybody over to our place to share a big meal.
And I have to give a big shout out to my wife because she really took the lead on the cooking.
I think it was even my suggestion that we should invite them over to our home.
And of course, my wife had to sign off on that, right?
She had to approve and be like, yeah, let's do it.
But of course that means that we have to do a lot of work in preparing a big meal and cleaning the house and getting everything ready.
So yeah, my wife rose to the occasion.
She rose to the challenge and she did an amazing job.
She did the majority of the cooking.
So I think I did maybe 10, 15% and she did like 90%, 80%, 90%.
And originally we were just planning on ordering some food because it is a ton of work to prepare a big meal for all of those people.
And we did order some food, but we also cooked a lot as well.
I took the lead more in the cleaning side of things.
So don't worry, guys.
I wasn't just sitting around. watching my wife work.
I was there doing some work as well.
I was cleaning, I was cooking.
I made jeon, jeon, which are a kind of Korean style pancake.
I made a fish jeon, one that's made, I think it's codfish.
I'm not actually sure what the name of this fish in English is, but I believe it's cod.
It's like a white fish, flaky fish called dongtae.
So i made dongtaejeon and i also made some jeon with meat, with thinly sliced steak or thinly sliced beef, and those are called yukjeon.
And so to make those i take the meat or i take the fish and i would put it into some flour and dip it in flour and then after that dip it in egg and and then fry it in a frying pan with a little bit of oil.
And yeah, super good.
I love jeon.
So we had a bunch of jeon.
These Korean style people call them pancakes, but I don't think that's really a great word for them, but I don't really have a better word to share with you.
But yeah, Korean style savory pancakes, not kind of the sweet pancakes like we would have in Canada for breakfast.
So that was my job.
I cooked a bunch of John and my wife cooked so much food.
It was like a really abundant meal.
And maybe I should back up a bit before I talk about the food.
I'll talk about setting up to accommodate all of these guests in our tiny home.
Because, as I've mentioned here on HeLoops many times, my wife and I live in a very small home here in Seoul.
It's perfect for the two of us.
I think it's just perfect for the two of us.
And occasionally I wish we had a little bit more space, but that's fine.
However, when we have guests over, then it can start to feel a little bit cramped.
One or two people is okay.
Six other people is a bit much.
So to accommodate all of the people, what we did was we cleared out our living room.
So we only kept the sofa and, like the bookshelf and some of the things that we can't really move very easily, but everything else was cleaned and out, cleared out, so we had like a as much space as possible.
And then i set up a camping table and we used some lawn chairs that we usually use on our patio.
So i had to bring those inside, of course, wipe them all down, get all the dust off, this kind of thing, and then set it up, put a tablecloth over it and then we combined it with our other table, our dining table, and we had to use all of our seats, including my office chair here, my computer chair and my wife's computer chair.
So, and actually we were short two chairs, so my wife and i sat on another table.
Here in korea it's pretty common to sit on the floor, and so there are these tables that are quite low to the floor so that you can eat when sitting on the floor, and so we have one of those tables too, and it's nice because it just folds up and we can put it away in our closet.
But we unfolded that table and used it as a bench and sat on that.
So my wife and I actually sat on a table to sit at the table, funnily enough.
So anyways, that was my job too.
I had to set up all of this stuff.
And yeah, so our whole living room was occupied with tables and chairs.
And then our guests arrived.
We ate our meal at around 1230 or 1 p.m., kind of a late lunch.
And we just had that big meal in the middle of the day.
I think that tends to work pretty well is having a big meal like that in the middle of the day instead of in the evening.
I guess maybe every family is different.
But even in Canada that's what my family usually does on these big special meals like Thanksgiving or Christmas.
We always would eat lunch. pretty early in the day, like one or two.
And then you eat so much food that you're stuffed and you don't have to eat dinner, right?
You're just like full for the whole rest of the day.
So our guests arrived and we all sat down at the table, or at least everybody did except my wife and I.
We were going back and forth between the kitchen like preparing food and serving people and getting everything set up.
So we were kind of going back and forth as you do as a host, right?
And let's see the menu.
Let me tell you about all of the delicious food my wife made.
She made this kind of steamed pork rib dish called Kalbijim.
And she also made a different pork rib dish called LA Kalbi.
LA Kalbi.
Super delicious, and she did a great job on both of those.
Kalbijjim, like I said, it's steamed pork ribs and it's in this kind of savory sauce with other vegetables as well.
There's carrots in there, little potatoes, onion.
It was delicious.
Then there were the chon that I made, and I told you about those.
We also had some pasta and some gnocchi and chicken wings.
I made chicken wings.
I just grilled some chicken wings in our oven and put a little salt and pepper on them.
We had to appeal to the boys' tastes, right?
Our nephews.
Their palate maybe isn't as refined.
Actually, I think they eat pretty much everything.
But still, we made them some chicken wings just to make sure that they were accommodated for.
And then my mother-in-law brought over some Korean-style chicken. dumplings, which are called mandu.
And then we had this noodle dish which I really love, called japchae, which is like glass noodles made out of.
I believe they're made out of sweet potato sweet potato noodles, I think.
And then also in japchae, there's like some mushrooms in there.
Eggplants and some thinly sliced carrots.
It's just a really delicious noodle dish.
We had japchae.
Of course, rice.
We had rice.
We ordered a pizza as well, just for the kids to make sure that they were happy.
And I love pizza, so...
My wife threw out the suggestion there, like should we order a pizza just to make sure we have enough food?
You know, you never want to have too little food, right?
I told my wife this like when we're cooking, it's okay if we make too much, because we can have it for leftovers or we can give it to our guests to take home for leftovers.
And that food's not going to go to waste.
We're going to eat it for sure.
However...
If you have too little food, then it causes a big problem, right?
You feel kind of embarrassed as a host if you don't have enough food for your guests, and then everybody's a little bit hungry and dissatisfied.
So it's always better to have too much than too little, I think, when it comes to hosting this kind of dinner party or this kind of chuseok party.
So we had lots of food.
It was an absolutely delicious, glorious meal.
And of course, I'm very thankful that I was able to spend it with good company.
Now, speaking of company.
What do you guys usually talk about when you hang out at like a family gathering like this?
There are a couple of conversation topics that are usually off limits or no-nos in the West.
Things like politics can be very divisive, meaning that these days, I think in many countries around the world, politics are very divisive, which means that people are divided right.
So you're either maybe you think this way or you think that way, and it can cause big arguments.
Right.
So politics is a no-no.
Usually finances and money is a no-no.
Religion is a no-no.
These kinds of topics you don't want to talk about.
Of course every family is different, but yeah, usually we don't get into that too too much for our family gatherings.
Of course, people always ask me about my work.
They ask about the podcast.
How's the podcast going?
They ask me about running, my hobbies, these kinds of things.
I get questions asked by my wife's family about these things.
But when we're all talking around the dinner table, the one thing that everybody has in common you know that we all have different careers, we all have different hobbies, all have different interests.
But what's the one thing that everyone has in common except me? is other family members, right?
The extended family.
And so that was a popular conversation.
Topic is talking about, like other, cousins and aunts and uncles and extended family.
We call this the extended family.
Your immediate family is your parents and brother or sister and wife or husband.
If you're married, this is what we call your immediate family.
But your extended family?
It goes beyond that right.
Your grandparents, aunts and uncles cousins, etc.
And so I've been married to my wife now for four years, a little bit over four years, four and a half years.
And I've met her extended family occasionally from time to time, but we don't get together very often.
And of course, I'm not a native Korean speaker by any stretch of the imagination.
However, my wife is Korean and so is her family.
So everything's taking place in Korean.
All of the conversation is happening in Korean.
So I think these two things make it a little bit hard for me to participate in the conversation, because they'll be talking about some cousin's husband's mom or something like that.
I don't know.
And I don't know who these people are, you know, like maybe I've met them a few years ago.
Maybe they came to our wedding.
Maybe I've seen them at a different family event, but I don't know who everybody is necessarily.
I will say though that, even though I don't know who everyone is and I do have to ask my wife later like, who are you talking about exactly?
What was, what was the funny story about this person?
Who is that person?
And she'll fill me in later, but I can't just keep asking like, who's this person?
Who is this person?
As we're having the conversation.
So I don't know.
I thought that was funny.
I will say that I feel like my Korean listening is getting pretty good, because when I first got married to my wife and we'd have these family conversations, dinners and conversations, I felt pretty confused sometimes about where the conversation was going or what the topic was.
Even sometimes was hard to follow.
And now I can follow it perfectly.
I just don't know exactly who they are talking about.
So anyways, yeah, I wanted to ask you guys that question.
What do you talk about with your family when you all get together?
I think maybe a lot of people tend to talk about their extended families in these kinds of situations as well.
So yeah, we enjoyed the meal and some conversation.
And then it was time for the cherry on top.
Actually, it was my brother-in-law's birthday the day before we all got together.
So we had like a kind of mini birthday party thrown in as well.
We sang him happy birthday.
We gave him a little mini cake.
I think I've mentioned on Q-Lips before here that my wife's family doesn't like cake.
I'm the only one who enjoys cake.
It's too expensive to do that.
We just bought him a little mini cake and you blew out the candles and we had this kind of cute little birthday party in the middle of our gathering there.
And then it was time, like I said, for the cherry on top, which was the games.
Now, I think every family is different in Korea, but in my wife's family usually they give out some cash money, some cash money as gifts at the end of the gathering, before everybody goes home.
A little pocket money.
So I know that we give our nephews a little bit of pocket money, and we also give my wife's parents a little bit of pocket money.
And sometimes they even give us a little bit of pocket money as well.
So there's like this gift giving that goes on at the end with some envelopes are exchanged.
We're all giving cash back and forth to each other before we say our final goodbyes and we go our own separate ways.
So, instead of just doing that, this year we received we're lucky enough to receive a couple of envelopes.
But for the money that we gave, we didn't put it in the envelopes.
We played some games.
So my wife prepared these two fun games to give the pocket money to our nephews and to my in-laws.
And so the first game was pretty funny.
What we did was we actually took the top of the pizza box from the pizza that we ordered and we made sure it was nice and clean.
Don't worry, it was a nice clean pizza box.
There was no cheese stuck to the top of it or anything like this.
So we had the pizza box and...
In the pizza box, we put a bunch of cash, all of the cash that we were going to give as presents.
Anyways, we put it in the pizza box.
And then we played this game where what you had to do was a pizza box was on the table with all the cash in it.
And we gave like a cake serving tool i don't know a cake server, you know like if you were going to cut a cake and then put this tool under the cake to lift up the piece of cake and put it on a plate, that kind of cake serving tool that you see in a kitchen.
We gave that to the player of the game.
They had to wear a blindfold so they couldn't see what they were doing.
Their eyes were covered.
And we put 15 seconds on the timer.
And their job was that they had to try and lift as much money out of the pizza box and put it onto a plate as they could.
And at the end of the 15 seconds, the money that they could lift out of the box and put on the plate they could keep.
Now they couldn't just scoop it, right?
You can't just like put the tool sideways and scrape all of the money out of the pizza box onto a plate.
That was against the rules, but you just had to pick it up, lift the money and try and do as much as you could.
And it was really funny.
It was hilarious to watch this happen.
My mother-in-law didn't do so well.
I think she got nothing in But it was hilarious to see her try.
She tried really hard, but wasn't able to snag any cash.
My father-in-law, I think he did all right.
He got maybe around $100, equivalent of $100 American or so.
But the youngest nephew, he really cleaned up.
He got like over 300, which was way more than we were intending to give him, because this was everybody's money all mixed up on here.
So he ended up with so much money that we had to quickly change the rules and adjust it so that the young kid didn't get all of the money.
We had to have some leftover for the in-laws as well.
And to be honest, he kind of cheated because he wasn't lifting up the serving knife.
He was more scooping the money onto the plate, but he still did really well.
So that was the first game.
That was really fun.
And then the second game as well was super fun.
So we cleared off our table and my wife arranged some different bills on the table in a way that they were ordered from lowest bill to highest bill.
So at the front of the table, there were a thousand won bills.
That's like, think of it as being around $1.
Okay.
That's just the easy way to calculate, even though it's not really exactly it.
But let's say, a dollar at the front of the table and then there were 5000 won bills, so like 5 bills, and then man won bills, 10000 won bills 10, and then 50000 won.
Oh, man won bills that were at the back of the table.
So the money with low value was at the front of the table and the money with high value was at the back of the table.
And then we gave the player of the game, you know, those kind of sticky hands that are toys that kids can use.
They're like super, super sticky and they're like jelly.
So they can, you can extend them, right?
You can like kind of whip it and it will go really quite far and extend, and then it can stick to the wall.
Well, we gave the player of the game one of those sticky hands, and their job was to try and grab the money with the sticky hand and see how much they could get.
We gave everybody three attempts to do this.
So you had to whip the sticky hand and try and grab the money and pull it back to you.
And yeah, that was also super hilarious to watch.
And again, the nephews did really well.
And the rest of us didn't do so well.
I played the game.
I said to everyone, you know, this is not as fun to play when it's your money on the table.
Like I'm not actually winning any money because it was my money that was on the table.
But just for kicks. i gave it a try as well and i didn't win anything i couldn't even grab any money it was pretty difficult to do but yeah the nephews they they had a knack for it they got it really quickly so they did really well but yeah everyone enjoyed the games we're laughing super hard it's going to be a great memory going forward i think we got lots of photos and videos as well so That was a great time.
And I encourage you.
If you have any family event in the future, I think it's a great idea to prepare some games like this.
It's really fun for everyone to do.
And yeah, it was a great idea that my wife had.
I think maybe she saw it on social media and got some inspiration from social media.
And so, yeah, that was cool and fun.
And I hope we do more of these styles of games in the future.
And yeah, and yeah, after we played the games, it was time for everyone to go home.
And yeah, everyone laughed.
My wife and I had to do the second cleanup, right?
We had to do the dishes and put all the table and chairs back and clean up again.
And by the time that is finished, then we are totally exhausted, forever full and exhausted, and i think we just sort of passed out early and went to bed early that night and yeah, the nice thing was that when we woke up the next day we still had many days of holidays remaining.
Like i said, we have this big stretch of holidays in korea.
So yeah, that was how i spent last week some downtime with the holidays, but also some busy time hosting my wife's family here at our home.
Well everyone, I think I've blabbed on long enough for this episode for today.
I hope you enjoyed listening to it.
And if you made it to the end of this episode, congratulations, amazing job.
Keep up the good work because this is what you need to do to build your English fluency.
And I'm going to leave you with one final question.
I'm curious what do you do to celebrate the fall or to celebrate the harvest in your country and in your culture?
Let me know by leaving a comment or hanging out on our Discord community.
You can leave a comment or a voice note or a message there.
I'm really interested to see how you celebrate in your country and in your culture.
So let me know.
Go, go, go.
Leave a comment.
And I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
Until next week, everybody, please take care and I'll catch you in the next Q-Lips episode.
Bye-bye.
