Repatriate Me!

This past weekend my wife and I took the kids out to Andong (Wikipedia Article). My wife hadn’t been there before so it was a good trip for everyone in the family. We arrived in Andong just before 12 on Saturday and stopped at some little traditional village and took a few pictures. We later discovered that these traditional villages are all over the surrounding areas.

It’s really interesting as the building are all traditional style with people actually still living in them unlike the other folk villages I’ve visited in Korea. The other villages are interesting but this was somehow better. There was a real disconnect when looking at a thatch roofed house with a satellite tv receiver on that same roof and an SUV parked just outside the front gate.

After this we moved on to the HaHoe (prounounced Ha-way) folk village (Which according to Wikipedia is a world heritage site) which is the major tourist destination in the area and home to traditional culture in Korea. This place is huge and takes a few hours to go through properly. There are loads of buildings, totem poles, and masks to see.

Andong is also the home of a very famous Mask Dance Festival which I am planning on going to this fall. I’m happy we went in the off season with the family as we could move around at our own pace – unfortunately we missed the daily performace due to poor timing on our part. In any case I’m planning on going on a one day tour with a couple of friends this October.

While in Andong I bought three masks to go with the one I bought a couple of weeks ago and a puppet.

Now for some more pictures of the various buildings including the place where we stayed the night (just across the river from the village).

Walking up the hill here about 3-4 minutes takes one to the top of a cliff opposite the Hahoe folk village – I took three pictures and stitched them together.
Click for a larger image (2019×600)

Time to look at food – can’t travel without eating and one of my favorite things about travel is eating.

I have dozens of pictures I would like to share, but I think this post is getting long enough so I’ll end it with a a couple shots of a buddist temple we stopped by. I also took a lot of video while in Andong, but it takes much longer to edit and prepare video than pictures. When I get around to editing the video I’ll be sure to post it here.