Folk Village

Hi all,

We visited the Korean folk village, of which Jennifer has some great pictures and videos on her blog, here. For the sake of convenience, I've linked to the pictures on Facebook.

It was neat to see an older side of Korea. While we don't know for sure if this is how things would have looked back then, it was still cool. Korea has, for certain, changed a great deal in the last few hundred years. Heck, even in the last 10 years it's changed a lot.

We spent Saturday with Derek, a fellow teacher in Korea, and fellow gamer. We relaxed, rolled some multi-sided dice, and had a thoroughly good time.

We then toodled off to the Folk Village on Sunday (my kids made me giggle today, by mispronouncing folk... five guesses on what they called it by accident). There's traditional dances (as best as we can tell, that's how they looked), see-saw acrobatics, horsemanship, and a tightrope walker, who was rather amusing, if not bilingual.

It was great, and the only downside was a rather oddball recreation of a marriage, that had two elderly folks re-enacting their wedding for their 60th anniversary. It was sweet, sure, but we felt awful for these two older individuals having to go through a rather grueling performance at their age.

Nice museums, lots of animals, and cool shows. In short, it's quite worth checking out.

Speaking of change: Former President Noh (mispelled rather badly as Roh in English) committed suicide on Saturday. There's been a media furore over this here, since he was one of the folks who helped end the dictatorship in South Korea, and was the subject of a major corruption investigation. He became president after promising to root that out. Unfortunately, the investigation seriously tarnished, or threatened to tarnish, his reputation, and while I don't know that the police have come to a final conclusion, one suspects that he committed suicide to avoid further shame.

It is deeply tragic, however, whenever anyone takes their own life, and I hope he finds peace in whatever awaits us after death.

He, and others like him, helped change South Korea into what it is today.


Best regards,

Chris