Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

By this time, we had mostly seen the major sights in Seoul, and while we had seen some Folk Villages before, everything I read heartily recommended going to Suwon, a town about 90mn south of Seoul, to see both the Korean Folk Village, and the Suwon/Hwaseong Fortress, so we did :)

Getting there was half the adventure. Taking the subway with google transit navigation that was mostly not translated in roman characters, was an adventure in itself, and then we had to connect to a bus, which also was an adventure, but we made it and arrived at the folk village around 10:35. My guidebook wrongly said that the performance started at 11:00 when in fact they do start at 10:30, but by rushing across the village, we were able to catch the end of the first one, some pretty fancy dancing in nice costumes (we subsequently watched the second showing at 14:00 to see the full show). The rest of the village is quite big, and there is definitely a lot to see:

After the first 3 performances, we went to see the re-enactment of a traditional korean wedding. I kind of felt bad for the poor girl who had to be married twice a day, every day :)

on the plus side, she get carried away by 4 men after each performance :)

A few random pictures of the rest of the village:

demonstration of how people were punished back then :)

oinkeu!

that's a lot of kimchi!

interesting sculptures :)

After finishing the village, we took a cab to the fortress (by bus, it would have taken too long, and cabs are pretty cheap, it wasn't even $20). We started with the museum for a quick overview of what we were going to see, and explained how the lord at the time treated his workers well and got a good fortress out of it ;)

this is the magic map I really wish we had had sooner, my guide book didn't do a good job telling us where to go, but this map did

Next, we went to Haenggung Palace for a quite tour before catching the last trolley that goes around the city walls and that left at 17:10:

We then hurried to the tram to catch the last one and get a ride around part of the fortress walls. We arrived just in time to try some archery (we both kind of sucked) and then walk part of the fortress walls back (kind of cool actually). After a dinner in Suwon we got back to Seoul for some rest (90mn to get home from Suwon station, thankfully a direct shot to our hotel):

downtown by the train station was a bit of a contrast :)