정월대보름

Hey everyone! I hope that you're having a great week! This past weekend I went to Seoul to Namsangol, which is a traditional village in Seoul. On Monday (Feb 9th) Koreans celebrated 대보름 (Daeboreum or literally "Great Full Moon") which is a holiday that celebrates the first full moon of the new year based off of the lunar calendar. So they had a big celebration over the weekend. It was really cool, I love going to stuff like that.

There was a big "tree" made from a pole in the middle and twelve ropes around it. The ropes are for each of the 12 zodiac signs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Zodiac Here is a link in case you don't know which sign you are and want to look it up. Some pretty interesting stuff, of course not ALL true, but some of mine is (I'm a rabbit or 토끼) Anyway, so people take colored paper and write their wishes for the upcoming year and then tie them on the appropriate rope based on your zodiac sign. Of course being a foreigner, people always love taking pictures of the foreigners at stuff like this, so some guy (I think maybe he was with a newspaper or something, he had a really nice camera) asked my friend and I if he could take some pictures of us tying our paper onto the ropes. I thought that was really funny. They had quite a few different booths set up, some were selling traditional foods, and others were set up for doing stamps and making kites (mainly for the kids). They also had a traditional music performance...these guys are really cool to watch. They have ribbons on their hats and they spin the ribbon around by moving their neck in a circle, and when they start going fast they jump the ribbon, etc. and dance around while playing their particular instrument (most of them are like drums or cymbals). There was also a huge paper flower exhibit. If I understood my friend correctly Buddhists use flowers with their worship and so of course this time of year flowers aren't growing. So they would make these beautiful elaborate flowers out of paper and use them for their worship. Some of these flowers are absolutely amazing and very very detailed. Looking at them from a distance it's hard to tell that they are paper. After we checked out all of the exhibits and ate some good food we went and watched a traditional Korean music performance called 답교놀이 (Dapgyonori). Dapgyonori is one of Korea's traditional performing arts. People in the time of the Goryeo Kingdom would perform this when the moon comes up on the 15th of January (lunar calendar) to see if it would be a bumper year for their crops. It was a really awesome performance, the only problem was that they asked for people please not to take pictures. It was preformed inside and I think they didn't want people's camera flashes going off in the performers faces. So, I didn't get any pictures during the performance, but I did get one afterwards with two of the performers.

Below are two short videos I took, one is sort of like teeter-totter and it was really fun to watch. The woman is wearing the traditional 한복 hanbok clothing. The other is the music performance, sorry there is no sound on my camera, so you can't hear it, but you can watch them!