Jeonju Hanok village

Day 4 – Jeonju Hanok village

Sunday, 8 April 2012

I think everyone has to experience sleeping on the floor. It’s definitely an experience. We are too soft and our bones don’t like having to be in contact with hard surfaces. The ondol room has underfloor heating so we were too warm with the heavy quilt, tossed and turned to but still felt the floor beneath our hips, and Anthony kept losing his pillows. I ended up using a small pillow that was filled with grains, like a heat pillow. It was surprisingly comfortable!

There was a small range of breakfast offerings – a couple of different soups (variation of miso soup and a cream soup), steamed rice, salad, steamed greens, hard boiled eggs, seafood extender wrapped in a steamed green, kimchi and other pickles, white bread and sweet bread rolls, orange juice, filtered coffee and green tea bags. I enjoyed the salad and seafood extender and Anthony enjoyed the rice! Miso soup was OK but very brown and chunky with lots of seaweed.

We had a full day sightseeing, mostly in Jeonju Hanok village. This is an older part of the city where you can still experience traditional life. It is quite extensive with more than 700 traditional houses – the sort of place to go and take the family for a Sunday outing (like the Rocks in Sydney or Berrima in the Southern Highlands). There were places of historical and religious significance like the Jeonju Cathedral and the 500 year old ginkgo tree; places to eat and have coffee; a local market with handmade craft stalls; lots of supervised activities for the children like kite making or pottery; and places to view and buy traditional crafts, art, ceramics and textiles; and an all-day martial arts display. There must be an election soon as they had a mobile screen with a politician giving a recorded speech and then his photo inserted into a cartoon song.

There is accommodation at the village but facilities are quite basic. People do live in the village and you can see glimpses of their life in washing lines, the small gardens of pots with lettuces and onions, earthenware jars of kimchi and men tiling a roof.

We bought a few souvenirs but mostly we ate.

We ate at food stalls – minced beef on a stick dipped in sweet chilli sauce; chicken skewer with sweet mustard sauce. We sampled Jeonju mojo which is a brown fermented bean liquor tasting of cinnamon but otherwise indescribable – OK for a sip but couldn’t drink a whole cup; Korean version of deep fried pretzels but not salty and a soft serve green tea ice-cream in a waffle cone.

We had a lovely coffee and green tea latte at the Story cafe, and the traditional Jeonju lunch of bibimbap (combo of steamed rice with a small amount of minced beef, vegetables, pickles and egg).

Back to the hotel for a short break to look up how to get to our accommodation in Busan, then out again for a walk along the river before sunset. A very pleasant walk with those small glimpses of Korean life – a woman washing her clothes in the river, people gathering greens on the verges, a couple stripping the outer leaves of spring onions and a man with a pick axe doing something on a set of stepping stone rocks.