Jeonju Hanok Village and Internation Sori Festival

Last week the yearly international Sori festival took place in Jeonju. It's a musical event that is mainly focused on traditional music. There are different performances, not only from Korea, but from several other countries as well. My boyfriend has attended this event many times before, he even played with his band a couple of times, but since I just moved to Jeonju this summer, it was the first time for me.

An opening ceremony took place on Wednesday evening at Sori Art Center. I don't know how much the tickets were, but my Russian friend who studies in Seoul, invited me and my boyfriend and gave us the tickets for free. Unfortunately the ceremony started at 7 and my boyfriend just got back from work at 7. After that we got ready and left, but it took as a long time to get there, 'cause there was so much traffic. So when we finally entered the hall and got to our seats, the performers started bowing already. So ya, we didn't really see anything. Too bad. My friend said it was quite good. After the ceremony there was a kind of reception with food and drinks, but it didn't taste that well. So we missed the whole ceremony, but I did get to see my friend from Seoul and meet some of her friends as well, so the whole evening/night was quite fun. We went for some makgeolli (a traditional Korean alcoholic drink usually made from rice) and then we took them to the Absolute bar where my boyfriend's band sometimes has concerts and where one of the band members works.

The photo is from a place where we drank makgeolli. Koreans usually also eat a lot when they drink, especially if they drink makgeolli or soju, I think. These kind of dishes are called anju.

On Saturday we decided to check out the festival at Jeonju Hanok Village, which is a traditional-style village located in the center of Jeonju. Tons of people came from all over Korea to see this festival, so the whole village was really crowded. It took us forever to find a parking space, but we got lucky eventually :) First we walked through the village, trying to get to a yummy tteokgalbi restaurant. There was a line of people waiting outsite, so it took us about 15 or 20 minutes to get a table, but it was worth waiting. Tteokgalbi is a dish made from pork and beef shaped into rectangles and grilled on charcoal. It is really really yummy. We were so hungry that I forgot to take a photo, but I will include the one we took last time. Oh, it seems like that time I was also too hungry so there is almost no food left on the table, but you can still see some of the tteokgalbi.

After that we went for some ice-cream. There was this really really yummy ice-cream we had in Lotte World - an amusement park in Seoul, and I saw a similar one being sold in Hanok village. So we decided to try it out. They had tons of flavors to choose from. I couldn't decide between peach and strawberry so I just ordered what my boyfriend did: blueberry yogurt. Usually the thing he orders ends up tasting much better than whatever I order, so I just went with his decision this time and it was really good. ^^ The weather was really nice and sunny (almost a bit too hot) so we were just sitting outside for a while enjoying our ice-cream.

Then we finally got our hands on the festival program pamphlet and decided what to see. Well it was me who decided, really. My boyfriend wanted to see some band, but they weren't playing on Saturday evening, so we went with my decision. I wanted to see something traditional Korean and pansori sounded great. I heard so much about pansori but I never had a chance to see the real performance. My boyfriend wasn't too excited about it. He says it's not that he doesn't like Korean traditional music, it's just that he had to listed to it so many times when he was younger.

We slowly walked toward the Traditional Culture Hall to see the pansori performance and decided to have a little snack on the way. We were really full from tteokgalbi and ice-cream, but there are so many types of snacks being sold on the streets of Hanok village that you start to feel hungry again just by looking at them. We decided to go for some waffles :)

 

Finally we arrived to the Traditional Culture Hall and got the tickets for the pansori performance. They were 10.000krw each. Ouch, a bit expensive. But I really wanted to see it, so we payed for the tickets and went it. We were about 10 minutes late but there were still a couple of seats available. Luckily, 'cause the performance is about an hour and a half long.

Pansori is a traditional Korean performance. It is kind of like a story telling. There are usually two performers: the singer and the drummer. While the drummer gives the rhythm, the singer singes, narrates and acts out the story. Different parts of the story have different rhythms.

 
The pansori story we saw was Chunhyang-ga. Sounds familiar? :) I know Korean names are difficult to remember, but I'd written about it before in my blog. It's the story from Namwon. I wrote a lot about it, so if you don't remember just reread the post about Namwon trip.

I've lived in Korea for 3 years now, so my Korean language skills are not bad at all. However, it is still much harder to understand things like songs or musicals, and especially pansori where they use kind of an old-style Korean. So I couldn't understand a lot of what the woman was singing (but neither could my boyfriend ;)) I looked around at people and I noticed they had these pink booklets with all the lyrics written inside so that they could follow more easily. I also wanted one... The woman sitting in front of us had two! And she wasn't even using them, she was sitting on them. My boyfriend told me to just pull it out from underneath her butt, but I was pretty sure she'd notice, so I decided to wait. I figured, if she keeps moving, the booklets would eventually end up on the floor and she wouldn't even notice. And that's exactly what happened. :)

The singer was really good, she had a strong voice... but what impressed us the most was... how on earth could she memorize 15 pages of the story?! Wow~ impressive :) During the performance I looked at my boyfriend once and he was sleeping lol Also, another funny thing about the performance was the audience. They kept on shouting things like 'oi', 'hoi' and other stuff :) I found it so funny. I looked at it online a bit and it is a perfectly normal thing in pansori. The audience's shouting is kind of like an encouragement and it is called chuimsae. There was this old guy sitting behind us and he kept on yelling 'kurochi' which is like 'that's right!' lol I wanted to do the same, but wasn't sure when or what, so whenever the audience started shouting I just joined them and my boyfriend found it hilarious. :) Well, at least he was having fun and wasn't sleeping.

I liked the performance, it was interesting and I would love to see another pansori sometime. Especially now that I'm prepared and have learned all the shoutings :D But towards the end, it started getting really really cold outside, so we couldn't wait for the pansori to end. After it finally ended, they served some snacks - mostly rice cakes. I grabbed a lot of them - I figured we deserved them after paying 20.000krw for the tickets - and we ate them on the way to the car. Luckily our car was parked close by 'cause it was freezing outside.

Unfortunately I was sick the next day (on Sunday) so we couldn't go to norebang (karaoke) or anywhere else for that matter (except for the ER) but at least we had a great Saturday :)