Gangneung Danoje Festival

Dano is supposed to be one of the biggest holidays in Korea, but I think it has fizzled out a little bit in current years. I really don't know much about it, so here is a link to wiki to explain it further if you like: Dano Festival

Michael and I hit up what is supposed to be one of the biggest arts and crafts festivals in Korea on Saturday on a depressing rainy day. The temperature was nice though ~75 degrees. We were a little disappointed with what the festival offered.

We saw a lot of ajummas dancing, like here:

They didn't do any spectacular moves or anything. In fact, it was fairly reminicent of last month where they danced around to campaign music for the elections. There were a couple of cool performances like this mask performance, but it was also a little boring because we don't know much Korean.

There were booths for making your own mask, designing your own fan, making ancient malt beverages, and making your own tteok, a glutonous rice cake treat. These booths kind of looked intriguing, except for the fact that it was all kids doing the activities. I did not see a single adult make a mask or fan. If they were in the booths, they were helping the kids do the work, so we did not partake at the chance of feeling awkward.

We were definitely made awkward when we were interviewed by a bunch of high schoolers for some sort of school project. They did not know much English, but they did give us free cans of crappy coffee for our trouble.

There were a lot of kid-oriented activities, such as rides, arts and crafts tables, magicians, and stuffed liquor bottles.

The main highlight of this festival is supposed to be the nanjang, which is an outdoor market with thousands of arts and crafts vendors (It's supposedly the largest market in the country). This was majorly disappointing. There were a few booths with wooden sculptures, traditional masks, and various other works, but the majority of the booths were for food and random crap for your home. We saw at least ten booths selling mops and choppers, two dollar store type mega booths, and many vitamin supplement type booths. One woman had a booth to feature her python, but she didn't do anything fun with it. She talked for what seemed like an hour and then showed us her arm, where it was once bitten by the python. The highlight of the whole thing was her taking the rear end of the python out of a basket. That's right, she did not show the whole python, only the last few feet of it.

It was overall a downer kind of day. The bus ride was two hours there and two hours back and very expensive. Michael wasn't feeling well again and we only stayed in Gangneung for about three hours. Oh well. Everything is an experience, right?