Old Pictures: There were masks, dances, and sometimes even both!

In October I took a weekend trip to the Andong Mask Dance Festival. It was a great weekend, and I got to see a lot traditional Korean mask dances, as well as international dances and some more recent additions to the Korean dance repetoire, such as belly dance and B-boys (break-dancers). Here are some pictures from the trip.

Masks! Music! Story-telling! Dancing! Andong! Yay!

Awww. :) Happy and looking forward to the festival. And then...

Fear, apparently. I think this is right after I spotted a Korean man unabashedly taking picture after picture of myself and the other Fulbrighters. This became a running theme of the day.

I know it's a little mean to laugh at the English mistakes that happen all the time in Korea. But at the same time, it's really funny.


This was a solo dancer from Bhutain. He was really good, and it was one of the best things I saw that weekend.


The Korean ladies....


Preceded by the Korean men. Love the hats. I also wish I could play these drums! (I took a one-day salmunori class in Chuncheon, and it was a lot of fun.)






About fifteen seconds later the lion eats the tiger. It was very short dance, but I really enjoyed it.

MASK.


This was an interesting dance too. If I remember correctly, it was about a Buddhist priest. Here he was bowing to all four sides of the stage, although I'm honestly not entirely sure why.


Ah, this one's up there with the English mistake. This is the jjimjilbang (sauna with common rooms you can sleep in for cheap) that we stayed in overnight. 25시 means 25-hours. As in, it's open 25-hour a day. Any weekend you can stay in a sauna that bends the space-time continuum is a good weekend in my book.

That's it for now. Hope you enjoyed the pics!

Also, want to know what drives me NUTS? Posting pictures on blogspot.com. It sucks. It disconnects me from the internet every 5 seconds and screws up the formatting to it's impossible to have a clean post that involves photos. Oh, the things I go through to show you these pictures. In other words, if the formatting is kind of messed up or there are spelling/grammar errors that it looks like it I was too lazy to fix, sorry.