Nami Island and Chuncheon Mime Festival

On Sunday I collected my "pay" for editing the paper written by my travel agent. ("Wednesday and Thursday" post, about 15 postings back.) Fides (her "church" name) arranged for me to join her, her younger daughter, called Suzie, and Elodie, from France who's doing an internship at Fides' agency, on a day's excursion at no cost to me. It was fair pay for my editing help. We first took a train, leaving at 7:50 a.m. (!!), to Gapyeong where all of us on the tour got off in order to take a bus to our first destination, Nami Island.


Nami Island is a tourist destination with some pretty scenery and a wide range of activities to appeal to a variety of age groups. One could easily keep busy for a full day; we had 2 hours. We rode bicycles for half an hour, walked around some, and got a pretty good idea of the island.

There were several very nice avenues of trees.




I liked this group of statues, representing pungmulnori players. I, of course, picked the buk.
We all got back on the bus and took a relatively scenic drive along a river to Chuncheon, the location of the Mime Festival. We were there on the opening day so there were only a few performances since most of the afternoon was taken up with the opening ceremony.









But first there were activities, like making a fish hat; watching a performance which, it being opening day, highlighted water; and checking out the volunteers (the subject of the paper Fides wrote and I edited).












The opening ceremony represents the theme of fire versus water, in which water always wins. It was faintly reminiscent of the St. Paul Winter Carnival battle between King Boreas (ice/winter) and Vulcan (fire/spring). The volunteers played a big role, first handing out plastic raincoats to watchers, and then getting fully involved in the water play. One understands the appeal of volunteering to high school and college students since the event looked a bit like Ft. Lauderdale on spring break (minus the beer -- I think). Here are some pictures from the ceremony, depicting the battle -- and the wet victory.


In addition to the festival, Chuncheon is noted for a special Chuncheon chicken dish, cooked on a griddle pan in the middle of the table. It was quite delicious!

At 4:30 we got back on the bus for a quick ride to the Chuncheon train station and the trip back to Seoul, arriving about 8 p.m. It was a long, 13-hour, day but great fun.