Pictures
1. Catapults lining the path by the lake. I was unaware that these were a Korean invention, and judging by the fact that they only threw a small piece of wood about three feet, have not been refined in the last couple of thousand years.
2. A horse among the cherry blossoms.
3. Going back a thousand years. A Korean shaman/preistess bows before an offering to the gods for a good spring planting season.
4. The band gets ready to take the stage.
5. Two guys, on the stage, saying something that I could not at all understand, but the masks were kind of cool.
The Sokcho Spring Festival
16.4.07
This past weekend was the Sokcho spring festival. Judging by the banners that I had seen all over town the preceding weeks featuring an archer on horseback, I kind of assumed that the festival would consist of arrows and horses, hopefully in combination. But, being that this is Korea, the land of not quite right, I was disappointed. While there was archery, and horses, putting them together was just not an option.
Aubrey, Conor, and I headed down to Yongnanho Lake to take in the sites and sounds of the festival on a pretty gorgeous spring day. As we strolled along the lakeshore we started to run into loads of people. Some were roller blading, others running and walking, everywhere there were kids playing outside, with not a computer or television in sight. It was great to see the kids being typical here. So often they are trapped in a never ending cycle of cycle of school, studying, and hagwon, that they rarely get to be outside, running and enjoying the fresh air.
The festival itself was pretty cool. There were parts of it that showed what people in this part of the world did for thousands of years such as the drumming, which was really neat, and the alter of offerings that was bowed before by a line of women wearing white. Watching this, not really knowing what it all meant, I felt that this old spirit world that I was seeing was really a vision of what life must have been like for thousands of years, for people all over the world.
The reset of the festival, outside of the drumming and dancing, that did not go on for very long, seemed like a celebration of traditional life. There was archery, albeit with plastic bows and arrows, kids playing on stilts, and a tug of war contest, and everywhere you looked, were people in traditional costumes. It was a pretty neat day.
