Old Korea

We woke up this morning to a cool, misty, windy and rainy day. We had a tour booked for later in the day, which was mostly outside. The decision was whether to  cancel and spend most of the day in the hotel, or trust in the weather improving. We went for the latter.

At the appointed time the bus had not turned up (sound familiar?) so off to the concierge who was very apologetic and immediately called the tour company for an explanation. A few minutes later a minivan turned up off we went with apologies for the traffic causing the delay.

We were the only 2 in the van, and we figured we would either go to transfer point or pick up from other hotels. It turned out that there were a lot of cancellations and we were the only 2 on the tour.

We reached the village after an hour and a bit with moderate traffic. The village has been constructed to represent a Korean village of 150 years ago.

There were two styles of houses, those with rice straw thatched roofs, and those with tiled roofs. The tiled roofs were for the men of the family and the thatch for the women. The only exception to this was the wife’s bedroom which was tiled as the man may visit!! There was a corridor between the husbands bedroom and the wife’s  If the door to her room was open hubbie was allowed to visit, if it was closed she had a headache!

Female House

Male Home

Decorative Rafters

Due to the weather many of the activities were not taking place, we did see some cotton spinning, rope making and bamboo working.

Rope Maker

Cotton Spinner

Bamboo Worker

There was entertainment from a traditional band.

Drum Band

Korean Flute

Drummer

There was enough to keep us busy for a few hours, and as the afternoon wore on the clouds broke up and the sun came out, however the wind rose and the temperature dropped.

On the way home we hit the traffic. Seoul has 10,000,000 inhabitants with another 10,000,000 in the suburbs. I would guess about 99.999% live in apartments (we have yet to see a house).

Apartments

More Apartments

As they have no gardens, they all hit the roads on weekends to go to parks and outdoor areas. The apartments start at around $500,000!

We were stop and go for quite a while, to give some perspective at times there were three main roads in parallel with a total of 22 lanes, the main  streets in Seoul are generally 12 lanes wide. LA is a piece of cake compared to this. Red traffic lights seem to exist as challenge to see how long you can keep going through them before some brave soul with a green pulls away. It seems motor cycles deem the roads too unsafe, so they speed down the sidewalks, when it comes to making a turn across the traffic they will seek out the nearest pedestrian crossing and ride across it.

Tomorrow then a 2 hour flight to Ottawa is an early start, again for a 14 hour flight to Chicago. As it stand now we have an 11 hour stopover. I am hoping to use my considerable charm to get an earlier flight.

Depending how things transpire tomorrow there may or may not be another entry.

If there isn’t another entry, I will probably start up again when we get to Alabama in January.

Sooooo how many have been reading this?