Korean Folk Village

The Suwon trip, actually, was only meant to be a sort of foreplay. The real plan for the day was to visit the Korean Folk Village. I had wanted to visit it for a while already with Heather, and we agreed that it'd be a great place to bring our parents to. In fact, we'd wanted to go there before to see how it was, and then go again with the pops, but it obviously didn't happen. We learned, however, that there's a youths hostel inside the village, so it would be a cool place to go chill at with friends. Maybe some other time...

The village is a nice reconstitution of Korean traditional housing, both getting us to feel like back in the days and explaining the how and why houses were built so. There was also a cool explanation of the Korean floor heating system.

The village was pretty big, and also shown the difference between houses in the South (Jeju Island) in comparison to the Northern houses of the old times.

On site, were also museums, wedding ceremony demonstrations and horse acrobats in costumes. All the people working in the stores, obviously, were wearing Hanbok.

 After those long walks under the sun, we deserved a little filling for the stomach so we went for Korean BBQ. Unfortunately, we did not pick a great place to eat at, and I ordered a bit too much food, expecting that everyone would get a share, but mommy was not really into meat, Heather didn't really like the texture of their meat and I got filled pretty quickly... so yup. Bad choice, but good company makes it better.

Suwon - The LOOOOONG Fortress Walls

A bit before my parents came to Korea, Heather's mother also came to visit. Chuseok is the longest time we get off work (also technically the worse time to visit Korea unless you are crazy on getting reservations done for all transportation and hotels, as it is the busiest time of the year...) so we had both decided that it'd be the best time to get parents to come over. 

Man I have to remember the dates.... 

On Chuseok week, Wednesday, we'd planned to visit places close to Dongtan, as we'd planned to stay around Seoul for the whole coming weekend. Thus, we chose Suwon. To be honest, I basically followed what my parents wanted to see. They had a very nice Lonely Planet (in French, the latest edition, that they had had ordered specially) that had a good amount of nice places to visit, depending of the length of your stay in Korea.

Our first stop was the Suwon Fortress, a long walk under the sun where I hadn't expected to sweat so much. The weather had been quite cool at the beginning of the month so I really had not thought that it'd get this hot. In fact, I think that in the two weeks my parents stayed in Korea, there were only 2 days that were cloudy and cool, one of which was rainy, but that day they went near the North Korean border and over there it was chilly, but not rainy, and the weather was perfect for their hiking session.

I was not wearing heels, luckily, but my flip flops were not entirely appropriate for the fortress climbing under the hot Korean sun. At least, I had though of wearing long sleeves, so I did not get sunburns. The one piece I was wearing was, however, pretty hot as the fabric was really thick. I survived. 

I don't know if you noticed, but the colour of the day was orange. Orange onepiece. Orange bag. Orange shirt. Orange T-Shirt. I am telling you, Korea has this thing with Orange. Even NGlow is orange.

Heather, her mommy, and me :)

Dongtan in Picture