Cultures all around.

For the most part, last week was just another week. Holidays that I don’t care much about in the middle of nowhere, class schedule that changes without e knowing and playing online games (Where I kicked a bit of arse). The fun stuff happened over the weekend.

Saturday saw me attending the Baekseong Cultural Festival in Anseong. It is an annual week long festival that displays mostly Korean Culture with a bit of spice from other countries. Koreans are just like peoples of the world. If you don’t shove other cultures in their faces then they will never make the effort to learn about it and they will still believe they are the best. This gives them a chance see that everywhere has something good to offer. Please don’t think I mean all Koreans are like this because they are most certainly now. Lots of them read up on the world and some tries their best to travel so that they can learn more.

Enough about them and back to me. It is, after all, what the Blog is about, isn’t it? This festival was an opportunity for me to learn more both traditional and modern Korean Culture. You would be surprised how much you learn here about things that most people will not be able to tell you about. Famous things that Korean know exist, but never saw before themselves. Think of it like South Africans who say “Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world”, but they have never been there because they go to Margate every year.

The two things that I found most interesting was the Rope Dancing and the activity display for rice harvesting.

With the Eurum (Rope Dancing) you have one guy that walks on a tight rope suspended in the air with large wooden poles. I have to say that the actual rope walking only happens very occasionally. What does happen more frequently is the banter between him and one of his troops members in the band. Even tough I couldn’t understand the banter, I still thought it was great fun. Most of the performance is about the banter and not the rope dancing. If this seems weird then think of it this way. You only need few minutes to run across, jump up and down and get off. That might be interesting in itself, but it is not most certainly not entertainment.

The group that does this is called Namsadang. The group was supposedly started in the Joseon period and have been around ever since. Maybe, maybe not. The name of the festival is actually names after a legendary leader of the group.

Part of the group’s activities include Pungmulnori (Hats. With Twirling Tassel Dancing) and Beona nori (Leather Plate Twirling). Think of them as the Circus of old Korea. You can see this often in Insadong, although I can’t be sure how often now that it is getting colder.

The Rice harvesting is something that we don’t really get to see in South Africa and I suspect that even if we do harvest rice, then it is done with some kind of automated system. Here, however, you can still find people who use a divider akin to comb, spinning wheel and a few other things that I don’t know how to describe the this time, to separate the rice from the stems ( I left my camera at home and that is partly how I remember what to write about)

Other areas showed you how to twirl plates, paint masks and anything you can think of that is Korean Culture and can be enjoyed.

Food wise there were stalls where you could buy street food, like the chicken pieces on a stick, dakpokki and other things I don’t know the names of, au usual. Ass to this the normal fair section where you give away all your money for a chance to win something useless, bridges over the shallow river and plays that I have no idea what it as about.

I suppose I should add in that I went with 2 South Africans and an America. Getting there with them was an adventure all on its own, but since I am not writing a novel here, I will not bore you with the details of that.

In the next post I will give a quick run down of the Music Festival that was happening the same weekend in Icheon

*Please note that the statements in this Blog are not intended to make anyone look bad. I do not look down on Koreans. I'm merely describing how amusing I sometimes find people and I am mostly describing it to other westerners. Feel free to come to South Africa and tell the world how crazy we are because heaven knows, we are.