Jeonju Hanok Village

This is going to be 3/5 of my weekend getaways! It was technically a training trip with other Namwon English teachers and our Korean counterparts, but it felt more like a field trip! I was lucky that the training happened to fall two days after I started working, so I got a little bit more of an "orientation" than just being totally thrown into the mix. We left our respective schools after lunch and met at the educational building to board a bus for the hour ride into the Hanok village. After we arrived, we went straight to our seminar room where we got an example lesson that involved vocabulary for tastes and a quick orientation on living in Korea. It was actually pretty fun, and our taste lesson involved blind tasting. FYI Ginseng is a rough, rough thing to taste blindly.

Afterwards we went to this restaurant for some stew and meet, our supervisor treated us to coffee, and then we had free time. Some went out to some bars, but I'm still a little jet-lagged, so I opted to walk around with a few people to explore the village at night. Jeonju's Hanok village is absolutely beautiful! It has a bunch of traditional style houses with different souvenir shops, restaurants, and other places. We also climbed up to Omokdae, a temple created to commemorate the place where the first king of the Joseon dynasty rested after his war victory.

The next day we had an official tour around the village where we learned about the different structures and the reasoning behind their designs after breakfast of beansprout stew. We also stopped by the Jeonju Catholic Church, which is considered the most beautiful Catholic Church in Korea. It was crazy because weddings were going on, and tours/the public was going in and out as though there weren't! My friends explained that Korean weddings are very...factory. You're in and out, people are usually talking throughout the ceremony, and it's all very quick. How unromantic! 

I'm not sure where exactly we went next, but we had a traditional food experience where we learned to make three temple food-- Ginseng Salad, a sort of rice paper roll, and a nut bar. Our head chef explained to us that what is important is that all these foods did not have any ingredients that were thought to create anger (like meat or onions). I loved the nut bar. The rice paper roll was okay (however its accompanying spicy mustard sauce was enough to make me cry!), and I was not a fan of the Ginseng salad (I'm still scarred from my blind testing...).

We then boarded up our bus and went home to Namwon where one of the girls was nice to enough to help me buy a toilet seat and show me where the local Innisfree is (more on that whole thing later when I finally do an apartment tour!)