Korean Culture Maven
This weekend I had the joy of participating in Korean Culture day. The city of Daegu puts on a culture day each year for all the foreigners living in the area. They loaded us up on buses, took us to a museum and then to a little village. The museum turned out to have an entire building devoted solely to pottery from around 400 A D. The pottery was all from two adjacent dynasties and it differed only in whether it had a nipple or a cup on top. I was on pottery overload after about 10 minutes. That and the interpreter was trying valiantly to find technical english words for achaeological-type information, and lost most of us in the process. Then we went to the next building which turned out to a burial mound.
Traditional Korean burial sites have spherical mounds housing the various dead of a family. You can see these everywhere from the freeways. These mounds are generally fairly small (seeming big enough to house one maybe two bodies), but the mounds of the kings are as vast as pyramids! The museum was built next to a huge series of burial mounds; the largest one containing the ruler from the period the pottery came from. They had excavated the largest mound to show where all the attendants and the ruler were buried as well as where all the goods needed for the after-life were placed. They left the excavation open and built a dome-shaped building around it so you can walk through it. Very cool.
Next we headed to the little demonstration village where we commenced to become old-school Martha Stuarts Korean-style. We made baskets out of straw to carry eggs in, we pulled taffy, and we even harvested some sweet potatoes and roasted them in the ground! Luckily I teamed up with a pro for the taffy pulling because: 1. it is a crazy good workout for your lats, 2. created blisters on the hands of many of us, and 3. if you don't get it pulled before it's hardened it becomes a solid gob of taffy poop. We were some of the only ones in the bunch to end up with taffy rather than poop. I was proud. We ended the day with some traditional games. I think "traditional" games are called that because we were all equally limited in toys before the modern age. We soon found out that hoop rolling and tug-of-war were just as traditional to Korean culture as to English or American culture. You will appreciate that the team of teachers, lead by one of our administrators, cheated like hell and won all the games. ah, educators. We're an unruly bunch. :)
Traditional Korean burial sites have spherical mounds housing the various dead of a family. You can see these everywhere from the freeways. These mounds are generally fairly small (seeming big enough to house one maybe two bodies), but the mounds of the kings are as vast as pyramids! The museum was built next to a huge series of burial mounds; the largest one containing the ruler from the period the pottery came from. They had excavated the largest mound to show where all the attendants and the ruler were buried as well as where all the goods needed for the after-life were placed. They left the excavation open and built a dome-shaped building around it so you can walk through it. Very cool.
Next we headed to the little demonstration village where we commenced to become old-school Martha Stuarts Korean-style. We made baskets out of straw to carry eggs in, we pulled taffy, and we even harvested some sweet potatoes and roasted them in the ground! Luckily I teamed up with a pro for the taffy pulling because: 1. it is a crazy good workout for your lats, 2. created blisters on the hands of many of us, and 3. if you don't get it pulled before it's hardened it becomes a solid gob of taffy poop. We were some of the only ones in the bunch to end up with taffy rather than poop. I was proud. We ended the day with some traditional games. I think "traditional" games are called that because we were all equally limited in toys before the modern age. We soon found out that hoop rolling and tug-of-war were just as traditional to Korean culture as to English or American culture. You will appreciate that the team of teachers, lead by one of our administrators, cheated like hell and won all the games. ah, educators. We're an unruly bunch. :)
posted by Claire | 7:16 PM
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