Andong Mask Dance Festival and Hahoe Folk Village

"Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs"-Thomas Wolfe

It was quite a busy weekend comprised with a lot of traveling and a lot of buses, taxi and walking. I must say I'm quite tired after this weekend but I have a story to tell so let me start with my story. 

Andong is a small town Southeast of Gyeonggi-do ( the province where I stay). It takes the Intercity bus about 3 and a half hours to get there with reasonable traffic. Andong is very famous for it's yearly Mask and Dance festival as well as the Hahoe Folk Village on its outskirts. One thing I immediately realised was that there weren't any soldiers around and the town was definitely not as busy as Seoul or Uijeongbu. The town is also almost untouched by the Western Culture and although most of Korea looks the same you do see some differences.  

This weekend the group was a little different. It was Beca (British), Laura (American), Zack (Korean- Malaysian) and myself (South-African) this time round. The reason why I am explicitly mentioning the countries we are all from is because not only are we expats in Korea but we are expats in each other's countries as well making the group extremely dynamic and interesting. There is never a dull moment and from personal experience I have learned some much from them. We are different in so many ways and joining up to see the Korean culture at its best ended up being quite an adventure.

We got to Andong around noon, dropped our bags at the hostel and went off to the market next door. We chose the wrong alley way at this market, the meat market. There was a variety of meat including Dog meat. I never thought seeing skinned dogs in a fridge would freak me out that much as I can normally stomach things like it. But this was just one too much and unexpected. In Seoul you don't really see it that often or at least not where I hang out. I knew Koreans eat dogs but I never wanted to see it. There was also pig heads. hooves etc being sold. This was culture shock nr. 1.

First we went to explore the Hahoe Folk village. Hahoe are pronounced Ha/who. We wanted to see some mask shows and as the sites we referenced suggested the mask shows were everywhere but that wasn't the case. When we got to the Folk village we soon realised that there wasn't really a lot of emphasis on the mask but rather more on singing and dancing. The one show we watched at the folk village was more a religious celebration and people walked up the stage and bowed to a Buddha statue if I'm right. I didn't really like standing around watching this whole thing since I didn't really understand what was happening and the music was really terrible. I personally cannot handle the traditional Korean Music. I don't understand it at all and it hurts my ears. After the terrible show we wandered around the village and played in some trees. 

The scenery was gorgeous. The village was built on the shore of the river in the valley. There was little veggie gardens in the village and on the outskirts rice lands. The river bends around the village in the form of a U-shape and as the legend tells the story the men fished on their little boats in the river and at sunset they would celebrate their catch at the Rock of Brothers which is a big rock in the middle of the river. On the other side of the river there is a hill with a few pavilions. Beca and I jumped on the ferry just before sunset and explored the mountain side as well. It's really beautiful to see the sunset and the valley from the top. This mountain was used as a sacred place to pray and from that a ritual started. At night you would make a wish, fire up material and throw it down the riverside cliff of the mountain. This ball of fire would land in the river creating a beautiful reflection in the water and on the cliff. After watching a beautiful sunset we found our spot on the river bank and waited patiently for the fireworks to start whilst enjoying Makgeolli (Korean rice wine).

The whole tradition was explained to us. It started in 1935 and for many years this tradition wasn't followed probably because of the constant war but in the past decade they started practising this tradition again. They started lighting 5 ropes strung across the river. The ropes were festooned with papers made of mulberry-wood charcoal and created a fabulous night time scene. Beca and I followed by Laura and Zack danced under the ropes for a few minutes taking in this strange beauty. The Fireballs were thrown but in this time the river path changed and dried up a little so the balls of fire didn't exactly fall into the river but they threw them regardless. This was followed by a marvelous fireworks festival. It was perfect. Stars in the sky, fireworks and raining fire...  

The Mask dance festival was a little bit disappointing but then again maybe we just had really high expectations. We saw a traditional mask show and luckily we had Zack with us to translate the story. There was also a international dance show with traditional dances and music from Russia, Singapore and Indonesia. The dances and music made there was quite impressive. They had a lot of stalls and stages everywhere. We also went to watch a dance called The Execution but since we don't understand Korean or the songs they sang we just saw a lady singing horrible korean music, dancing whilst holding knifes. Afterwards we said to each other that we had no clue what happened at the festival since there was no English pamphlets or english interpreters. We did however have a blast. Like they say: It's what you make of it.