Kickin' It Old Skool!

The past few weeks here in Seoul have been pretty fun and interesting in a lot of ways, so I thought I'd write a quick note to tell you a little about it.

In my last post about my daily events I ending off with telling you about upcoming White Day. I most recently posted saying what White Day is and now I'll take you a minute to tell you about my White Day! As you know Randy and I decided to reverse traditional Korean Valentine's and White Day rules so he planned Valentine's Day and I planned White Day. As luck would have it, Randy completely forgot about White Day's existence, and I could have gotten off Scott-free if I had wanted! Instead I used it to his advantage. He probably won't appreciate me putting this on the Internet, but while he didn't know that it was White Day I convinced him clean his apartment until it was spic and span. Heehee, I'm so clever. Then, when I announced the occasion his first gift was a nice clean apartment! The rest of the day's festivities included Mexican food, some time at the driving range and a little scrabble to finish it all off. Wonderbar.



White Day was closely followed by St. Patrick's Day which I of course had to celebrate, having Irish blood running through my veins. My friends and I all went to an Irish pub not too far away from where we live called Maddigan's where we had a pleasant but quiet evening having a little celebration of our Irish heritage. Not everyone there was of Irish descent mind you, those who weren't were just a little jealous and decided to tag along.

The weekend was fairly uneventful with the exception of what inspired the title of this post, Kickin' It Old Skool! On Sunday we went to see the Korean Folk Village in Suwon. It was pretty neat! There were a lot of traditional Korean houses and people wearing traditional Korean clothing and making traditional Korean food. I had heard people say that there wasn't much to see there and that you could do the whole thing in 1/2 an hour, so I was surprised when I arrived to find a $13 entrance fee. At this point we had travelled around 2 hours to get there and had a two hour train ride to get back home though, so there was no way we weren't going inside. I was pleasantly surprised to find that (perhaps in part due to my geeky nature) I could have stayed there all day and not really gotten my fill. There were so many things to read and explore! There were different houses and structures used by everyone from the lowest pesant to the richest nobleman, shows, old style markets, livestock, traditional games to play and food to eat... wow! We didn't get to see it that day because we were a little late but they even hold traditional Korean weddings for tourists to see! You could make pottery, ride horses and pretty much waste an entire day, I thought. There was also an amusement park for kids next door, which I thought was pretty neat.

Perhaps one of my favourite things that I saw in the Folk Village that I think that you'd enjoy was a sort of "Magic Show", or so it was called by the people preforming it. They were making Dragon Beard Candy, which is a really neat thing to watch. I've uploaded two videos for you to watch and see how neat it is, although neither is as cool as seeing it in person. The first one is the exact one I saw at the folk village in Suwon, but the second one I think is a better video for seeing exactly what is happening. Hope you enjoy!