Jeonju

Last weekend we went to Jeonju, situated about 3 hours south of Seoul, on a tour with a recruitment company, WorknPlay. The majority of the 30 people in the group were English teachers like ourselves.

Jeonju Hanok village, is a traditional Korean village, which has 700 traditional Korean houses which are still occupied. We slept in a Korean house the Korean way (on the floor!) and had a craft lesson where I decorated a box with pretty Korean paper (hanji).

Below is a traditional Korean house, and beneath that is a primitive refridgeration system, aka a hole. They used to store meat and vegetables in a deep hole in the garden in the summer to keep them cool.

Jeonju is famous for it's cuisine throughout Korea. We had a cookery class where we were taught to make bibimbap, a rice dish with over 30 ingredients. I've eaten it tonnes of times and the recipe varies from place to place. Often, in addition to the rice, it includes bean sprouts, mushrooms, seaweed, carrots, sometimes meat, hot bean paste and an egg on top. This one tasted pretty good I must say!

After dinner in the evening they put on some traditional Korean entertainment. First a girl played a traditional string instrument, called a gayageum, beautifully. Then a guy sung, accompanied by a drum.



The next day, at a town festival, a HUGE bowl of bibimbap was made. Enough to feed 150 people! It seemed our tour group were guests of honour at the event, and we got to eat some.

At the festival we also got to try various types of tea and rice cakes with Korean ladies dressed up in Hanbok.




Jeonju church and a cool Korean dude

We stumbled upon a wedding. Here the happy couple are having tea with her parents
It was pretty good to get away from Seoul for a while. I've been crazily busy recently, hence the lack of blog posts and I'm sorry to all those people still awaiting a reply from their emails....:(