Village People & Woobang Land

I guess I'm living a "live for the weekends" type of existence over here. Weekends are when I get to do fun exploratory stuff. Weekdays are for teaching and skyping. Saturday Hee Jung took Ted and me to Andong (a much smaller city located about 1.5 hours outside of Daegu by car). Our destination was the traditional Hahoe Village. People still live in the village and live the village life, and they've open it up to allow others to see how they go about daily life. This was one of my favorite adventures in Korea by far. There were rice paddies galore, we saw the tools they use for husking rice, almost all of the buildings are made of stone with a rice husk roof, and they have this gigantic ancient tree still living in the heart of the village. It's so old that it's considered sacred, and people write wishes on small slips of paper and tie them to the perimeter of the tree (or on small tree branches) for luck. And yes, I made a wish and tied mine amongst the others.
We also got to see a traditional masked performance with traditional Korean drumming and this funky little horn thing. It was pretty entertaining even though I couldn't understand the dialogue. There was enough acting that I was able to get the gist of the story. The masks that they use are famous all over Korea, but they originated in this small village. The village is located in the little nest created by the river bend, so they've got this beautiful view of the river and the cliffs on the opposite side, and if you turn around they've got a beautiful view of the mountains. They definitely picked a good spot.

Sunday Ted accompanied me to Woobang Land so I could jump from the Woobang Tower. It's the tallest tower in Asia at 202 meters, and I jumped from 123 meters up (the 77th floor). Let me say that although that sounds impressive, it wasn't as thrilling as I was hoping it would be. It's not quite bungee jumping; it's more like base jumping on a wire. It was still cool, but I'll have to wait until I'm stateside to do any real bungee jumping. Koreans aren't really into "extreme" sports so that's about as daring as they get.
The view from the observation deck of the tower was absolutely astounding. I knew Daegu was big, but I never imagined it was THAT big. The tower gives you a 360 degree view of the city, and it's literally city for as far as you car see. There's a little tiny bit of mountain tops in the distance, but it's city for miles and miles. Incredible. This particular photo includes a view of my neighborhood.
On the way out we went through the amusement park, and we got to see this ridiculous performance. We just so happened to arrive just as they were beginning the Korean pirate rendition of Riverdance. I LOVE Riverdance so of course I recorded a bit of it to share with my Irish kin back home.

Next weekend I'm headed to Jeju Island with Angie, so I'll be sure to take lots of photos and post to the blog as soon as I've recovered from the long exhausting weekend. I even purchased an additional larger SD card for my camera so there's no chance of me running out of room for pictures.