Tradition... Tradition!

Heather had promised me we would do some travel when she returned from the US. She had told Leon and I we would go to some famous island in Korea whose name I forget, but since it took her so long to get back to Korea, there wasn't time for that. She ended up taking me to a little traditional Korean "resort," with tiny one-room cottages for an overnight stay. It was a three-hour drive to Andong, and the place was right by a little river and some hills.


Here's the view from our room:

This is one of the buildings in the complex:

Another:

Here's part of the property:

Heather and I took a little walk along a trail by the river:

There was a little sign on the trail that said these rocks are naturally shaped like this:

Here's the river:

Here's our room. Notice how small the door is:

As there are no beds in traditional Korean homes, lots of mats and linens are provided:

I think this was our breakfast building (rice, kimchi, vegetables, fish, and soup). The clayware is called onggi, I believe, and it's used for pickling, curing, and storing food:

After breakfast in the morning, we went to some Buddhist site that someone told Heather was great. It wasn't. I took a picture of this building, but couldn't take a picture of the statue of Buddha, which was about twenty feet tall and carved out of the side of a rocky hill:

Next we visited a traditional Korean village, which had examples of housing from poor to rich families, and there was also a museum that showed furnishings, food, events, etc. from traditional Korean homes and villages.

This is me in front of a little pond:

Here are some shots of the traditional houses:

This is an outhouse:

Korean houses were always surrounded by a wall, with a gate. I learned in the museum that the reason the Korean word for "wife" means "inside" is because wives were required to stay inside the wall of the family's home at all times, except for one or two "girls' days out" in which the women of the village got together for a picnic or something.

This is the kitchen:

I believe this is the abode of a poorer family:

On the way back we stopped at a bridge to see the water. This is me with Heather and her mom:

Me on the bridge:

This is the river. The water looks blue in the picture, but it was quite green for a river in person:

There were two quirks I noticed in Heather's family on this little trip: their obsession with snacking and her father's obsession with his car. Before we left Ulsan, we stopped at the store to buy breads, fruit, chips, crackers, candy, pastries, etc. to eat in the car and in Andong. We stopped for a big lunch of this chicken and noodle concoction when we got into town, then continued snacking most of the night. The next day there was breakfast, leftover snacks in the car, ice cream at the museum, more snacks in the car, Japanese noodle soup for lunch at a rest stop, then ddokbbokki (I think that's the right romanization--it's a very thick noodle with a little bit of veggies and ground fish reshaped into little patties with red sauce) as a snack just outside of Ulsan. I eat about six times a day, and that was a lot of eating, even for me. I'm not sure if this is a Korean thing, or if it's just this family.

Heather's father didn't really participate in the excursion, since he was focused on preserving the car. This I know is not uniquely Korean; old guys everywhere are always fussing over the car (and some young guys--Ryan, I'm talking to you). When we bought food at the grocery store, he drove all over the garage looking for two spots open so he could park between them and prevent dinging from other car doors; he woke up early the next day to put newspaper in the floors, because it had rained all night and he was afraid of the mud; when we made our stops at the temple and village and for food, he removed the newspapers and vacuumed the inside. He's a riot.