AISS organizes different activities with the aim to discover Korea. These activities take place on Wednesdays and are carefully planned to create an unforgetable time, as the trip we had to Jeju last week. Additionally, students also have an in-campus activity during the week, such as cooking or watch a movie.

On week 28 lectures started and in this Wednesday we visited the Folk Village & Hyundai Motor Company.

The Folk Village is as an open-air museum.  The village is well set up and very interesting. To my surprised they did not have audio guides for rent, however they did offer an app. As you might imagine I must check this! (Side note: a lot of potential customers for ubium  🙂 )

Next, I want to share my impressions of the Folk Village. For this purpose I select some photos. Remember, I am not into photography. I am fine with this fact, but when it comes moments of sharing I feel certain level of shame that I am not into photography. For sure with good shots I could be able to share more. Nevertheless, I am sure you will get an insight of what I saw with the complete _non_expert_photos_ 😉

This is the main entrance, and I like the view with the “mountain” in the background.

Once one crosses the main door, you see like an access to an amusement park, kind of  (photo below). It is word to mention that the place is full of little details, as for example the lamps or benches.

On the right hand of the “entrance” is the section of restaurants.

Before looking at the houses, if one walks on the central path, one encounters the possibility to ask for a wish. As the instructions indicate below.

Just in case, of course I tight my wish in here:

I was not careful enough to control from which houses I was taking which photos. The result is now I do not have a reliable track of the events. Consequently, here it goes only some impressions.

The houses in the village are from different socio economical levels. So you kind find houses from the farmers to royalty.

Also one could see small fields:

Ah! the following pots are important. The pots, picture in the preceding pictures, were used for the fermentation of Korean foods like Kimchi.

In the patio of another house you can see more pots. During our visit we have periods of time with rain, and actually it looks nice, but it was trickier to take photos.

In the patio of a wealthy house, more pots!

Also I saw a house with several statues of “gods” ? .

Inside the house was an altar.

The view of another house:

Inside of one of its rooms ( from the house pictured above):

The kitchen of this house, if I recall properly.

The following construction was on the path outside the houses. The cloth hanging from the tree it seems related to “luck”. Need to research about this at some point.

Ah! The next photo I took it to show the “resting” places for the visitors. For example, in the photo below there are persons  sitting inside a construction, enjoying the moment. One could sit in any of authorise constructions.

As in this one:

But one should take their shoes out.

Another resting area where one can see the individuals resting and the shoes below.

I like those resting areas, even though I had not chance to actually use them.

In my time at the Folk Village I entered the inside museum. The exposition is actually interesting, illustrating the activities that the villagers had during the year from the perspective of different age groups and genders.

I have several photos, as you can imagine, including the location of traditional games ;). But for this post I will only give the glimpse of tow topics: the patterns to make rice cakes  ….

and of course the section of “children’s play” 🙂

We were lucky and we could see a traditional dance. This was briefly because it started to rain at function time, but I could get very brief shots of it.

Some hats are interesting, right?

It called my attention that at the end of the Folk Village is a small amusement park. This section was, somehow, unusual. Specially if we take into account that the amusement parks got inspired from open-air museums.  After this, I REALLY have to read the book from Sten Rentzhog, Open Air Museums. The history and future of a visionary idea…… 

amusement park inside the village

Even a building for video games!  Shame I did not have more time in here!

On the other hand, I liked more the “traditional” houses, but this fact give good space for discussion and thinking.

One can be in the Village the whole day. Specially if one wants to explore it and experience in depth.

On the other hand, we are fortunate that AISS organises for us the possibility to have different experiences of Korea. So after have a taste of the village we drove to Hyundai’s factory.  As far as I understood, apparently, to visit to the plant is not easy. However the AISS team manage to get us a visit.

The next photo is arriving to the plant:

In the hall of the building where the personnel of Hyundai received us:

Next it is my last photo of this post, as one cannot take photos of the plant. The device I am showing is for the guided tour. The speaker has a mic and all of us have this speakers. Again, I could not avoid analysing the guiding system. In my personal opinion, it can be improved, for example technically, there is a lot of noise that could be filtered to listen properly to the speaker, additionally if one gets delayed from the group the connectivity of the speaker is broken.  Unquestionably, it requires a contextual design 😉

Independently of the radio-frequency device to support the explanation to the factory visit, I recognise the trip to the factory was enjoyable.

Thank you AISS for organising the day!