Namsangol Hanok Village

Hello again! Once again, I'm so sorry for all the overdue posts ㅠㅠ Currently I'm still two months behind but I'll definitely catch up soon~

So anyway, from 14th September to 18th September, we had a (very) long weekend in Korea. That was because it was CHUSEOK HOLIDAYS!!!!! Chuseok is one of the most biggest and most important holidays in Korea, and this is the time where all Koreans go back to their hometowns and spend time with their families. For 2016, Chuseok was on Thursday, 5th September, and usually in Korea, the day before and after Chuseok are also public holidays. For this year as well, the holiday period extends for 5 days, since the weekend followed after the 3-day Chuseok holiday period.

If you have a long weekend, the smart thing to do was to book a holiday out of Seoul, right???? Well me and my friends really overlooked that... We thought we could book a flight ticket to Jeju or a KTX ticket to Busan or something like that, but nope... everything was sold out. And yup, we had to spend our Chuseok in Seoul. Sighs. :(

Anyway, this post is the first instalment of how I spent my Chuseok holidays. On Wednesday 14th September, me and my friend Atirah decided to join a few of our Chinese friends to explore a traditional Korean folk village. We decided to go to Namsangol Hanok Village, which was located near Chungmuro Station. We actually got lost at the start... we somehow got into a place called Korea House LOL. There was a few photo opportunities here, so I guess getting lost wasn't so bad after all.

We finally managed to find the hanok village after asking the staff at Korea House. There are a lot of activities that you can do while you're here. I think most of the activities are held on the weekends, so before heading there, it's best to check out this website!

Entrance to the Namsangol Hanok Village :)

You can see the Namsan Tower from here!!!! :)

As mentioned before, we went there during the Chuseok period, so there were activities held that was related to Chuseok. If I was not mistaken, there was a booth where you could buy songpyeon, a traditional Korean food made out of glutinous rice. Luckily for us, they gave out some free samples to try out! I didn't take a picture of it though, sorry!!

Other than that, there was a booth where you could make your own bow and arrow (not sure how it's related to Chuseok but yup), and a booth where you could make your own spinning top. UNFORTUNATELYYYY you had to pay for those stuff.. and I am just your average uni student on a budget so I didn't do it lol. And yes, I know, I should've at least tried it out once, right???? But nah, there was more exciting things that I could do for free.... stay tuned for my next upcoming post to find out!!!

Anyway, in the village, there were a lot of traditional houses. Walking through the different traditional houses, you can see that these houses belonged to people of different social classes. For example, in one of the houses of the upper class families, they had doors that was hanging off the roof. In addition, I noticed that the size of the kitchens really determined how well-off each family was.... Like if you had a huge kitchen, it means that your entire house was also huge lol.

A living/dining room of an average Korean family

A bedroom of an average Korean family

This is the video of the hanging doors btw lmao

As we kept walking past the traditional houses, there was an area where you could play some traditional Korean games. There was one game where you can throw arrows, another game by using your foot to keep the shuttlecock off the ground (I know there's a similar game in Singapore called chapteh, but I have no idea what the Korean equivalent is called), and also a game where you could play spinning tops! It was fun playing these games... it felt like I was reliving my inner child. Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of this area.. my apologies again :( I really need to take pictures next time...

After hanging around the games area, we headed to this place where they had buried a time capsule (HOW COOL??????) in 1994. It is scheduled to be reopened four hundred years later. This place was definitely sooo cool, a place you should check it out if you're at Namsangol Hanok Village!

Afterwards, me and my friends decided to walk to Myeongdong to do some shopping, as it wasn't too far away from the village. At this point, me and Atirah parted ways from our Chinese friends, since we wanted to find a place to pray before doing anything else. Anywayyyy, after that, we were quite hungry so we decided to find a place to eat. We stumbled upon this restaurant called Busan Jib, located in a small alleyway in between Frisbee and Nature Republic. They offer some halal dishes at their restaurant, which was great!!! We ordered the asam pedas dish, thinking that it'd be close to having a hearty Malay dish. Well.... all I can say is that the dish has been Koreanised LOL but it was still a tasty dish. The cons to the meal was that it was quite expensive for uni students like us but we enjoyed our meal and that's what matters. :)

Busan Jib in Myeongdong!

They make it clear that they have halal dishes here... lol

I guess that's about it for this trip!!
Stay tuned for my next post for the next instalment on my Chuseok holidays :)