Cultural festival

The cultural festival took place in my university. It consisted of many interesting activities, but I was busy preparing for my presentation, so I could not join all of the activities.

After the presentation, I and my friends went around to take pictures. Students built many stalls from wood, straws and bamboos by themselves. Each stall represented a particular culture from many countries such as Korea, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Spain, Germany, Japan and so on.

I paid attention to the Korean stall because there was a big poster of SNSD. I was so over-excited that I rushed to be able to take photos with that poster. SNSD in hanbok is so beautiful and lovely. There is also a poster of Korean palace. There are two people in royal Korean hanboks. However, when the girl posed for the photos, she didn’t hide her hands under the hanboks. In Korean historical dramas, I notice royal women often cover hands under the hanbok. When wearing royal hanboks, maybe showing hands is considered as an impolite action . In front of the Korean stall, people hung a lot of Korean traditional masks called 탈. Inside the stall, I recognized two of 4 main Korean traditional musical instruments called 사물놀이. They are 장구 (an hourglass-shaped drum) and 북 (a barrel drum ). There is also a set of traditional Korean board game called 윷놀이.

Suddenly , I ran into a Korean teacher. He didn’t teach me Korean, but he helped me a lot with Korean. He worked at the Korean Culture Institute. It is a long time since I spoke Korean, so I felt not confident. However, I still managed to speak Korean for a while. We talked about the Korean textbooks, Topik, studying abroad and so on. I suddenly saw strange objects on the table, so I asked my Korean teacher. He said that it was the traditional Korean ‘top-spinning’ game called 팽이치기. He even demonstrated the game for me. After that, the teacher gifted me a long box. It turned out to be a poster of traditional Korean roofs. I saw this type of roofs many times in the Korean Palaces. The decorative color of this roof is called Dan Cheong (단청). I am so happy to receive this gift from the teacher. He said that it was not a gift, but a little souvenir . He was so cute and warm-hearted.