We’re not Porter II people, we’re Bongo III people.

 Our morning started early, at 4:15.  I got up and decided to confirm what time we had reservations in Andong.  Joel was awake, so he decided to check on me.  Jane was awake, and she walked in the second room said, “Are we having an awake party?”  After a brief dance party, we decided to all go back to bed and slept until 6:38.  

Breakfast was proportionately bizarre, stretching the limits of what I consider breakfast food but adding enough familiar favorites to make it edible.  Spoiler alert:  we stopped at the grocery store to buy more familiar breakfast foods for the next couple of days.  We’ll take pictures of their breakfast offerings tomorrow.  I don’t have enough words to describe it properly.

By 7:30, the parking machine had retrieved our car from the bowels of the building.  Parking at the hotel is free for guests, but it’s also unnerving.  The process is:  First you drive onto the large circular turntable.  This involves a lot of yelling and gesturing from the parking attendant, to make sure you get the car positioned.  Then, the turntable moves to face the car toward a car elevator pit.  One drives into the pit, whilst getting yelled at.  Drive too slow, and your front tires don’t make it over the wheel stop.  Drive too fast, and your front bumper hits the front of the elevator.  Put your tires at the wrong angle, and you don’t align properly with the machine.  Once the yelling is done and the driver feels sufficiently stressed, you get out and the car is sucked into the unmanned bowels of the building where it is stored.  You even keep your keys.  Beneath the floor, a machine rotates the cars around like a record in a jukebox.  When you retrieve the car, they enter your code into the machine.  When your car arrives, it’s facing the proper way.  You pull out onto the  turntable, get spun toward the exit, and you’re ready to pull out. 

 

Joel and Jane stopped at Starbucks, the only spot that had decaf and was open.  But WOW, Starbucks blew their minds.  It had a noteworthy line out front (even though there are many Starbucks around without a line), but this one was a worth it.  The entire Sbucks was a historic Hancock, with gardens, and inner chamber, its own bathroom building, and even a Starbucks inside the Starbucks compound.  We’ll definitely be back.

Fresh from my garage experience with a hot Starbucks coffee in my hand, we set out for the Hahoe Folk Village in Andong, about 1.5 hours away.  Hahoe is a UNESCO Heritage site of a medieval Korean town on its original site with many original buildings.  Original means built in the 1400’s but the grandson of the founder of the town.   The male lineage has survived since that original founder, and his Great Great Great… whatever Great Grandson still lives in the main house.  We got an English-Speaker tour of the campus with some university kids from Seoul.  They go to an International School so they have to speak English.  

We expected the village to be like Colonial Williamsburg, where you can interact with costumed townspeople and enter all of the houses.  Boy were we wrong there!  People were still living in all of these houses!  The “tour” of the houses just mean entering the antechamber yard and seeing them up close.  The aforementioned Great Great… whatever Great Grandson was actually living in the house that we were standing outside of.  They looked drafty, cold, and without modern amenities.  Despite being large and beautiful, I’m not sure I’d want one.

I had to take this bathroom video.  This soap threw us all for a loop.  We all tried to squeeze it before we figured out what it is.

Masks are a tradition in the town going back from its founding.  Annually, they would put on a masked play, with a stable of set characters.  This isn’t unique to this town, this is the folk culture all over Korea, but this was unique because the original masks were preserved.  Everywhere else in Korea, the masks were burnt after use, for superstitious reasons.  In this town, they kept the masks in the shrine and reused them, so the town still has possession of the entire collection and still has a large mask festival every year. Jane and Joel both loved the Scholar mask, so we got a hand-carved replica.  Jane is very much a mask aficionado, so the mask museum at the site really thrilled her.

After Hahoe, we went into Andong proper.  There are two must-do’s in this town, buying cheese bread from Mammoth Bakery and eating chicken in the chicken alley.  We were starving and decided to do both.  We knew we were close to Mammoth when we saw a long line.  Spoiler alert, we got the cheese bread (that isn’t guaranteed), took it all the way back to the room, and decided it was weird.  Literally scores of people wait in line for this bread, it’s a Korean pilgrimage.  We didn’t quite get it.  It wasn’t horrible, just not line worthy.

These pale round buns are the cheese bread that has a permanent line to buy (until they run out).

After the bakery, we went to the chicken alley for lunch.  This city is famous for the chicken dish, and about a dozen restaurants competed in an alley for those with chicken cravings.  We picked one I had read about, and ordered some chicken. It was another bib affair!  It looks crazy and tastes like heaven.  There was just no clean way to eat it.  Also, eating in one’s socks is an experience we weren’t accustomed to.  We gave that chicken a perfect score.  YUM.

Oddly, all of the chicken cooking and dishes cleaning was done in front of each of the restaurants, not in the back.  One had to walk through the kitchen to site.  It gave the alley a strange feeling to it.

Roaming around town after lunch.

After roaming around town, we headed back to Daegu.  We stopped at a giant grocery/Target type store, a department store but with a Costco-sized grocery store on the 1st floor.  

They were giving out samples on every aisle, just like Costco.

These were for sale with the Oreos.

They had intensive selection of ramen noodle.

They were selling platform crocs.

Like the drive to Andong, the drive home was breathtaking.  There aren’t pictures that could describe it, so I won’t try.  What I can describe is the cars.  There are 0.00 Japanese cars that we have seen (seems fair, all things considered).  There are a ton of Hyundai’s on the road, including a whole host of Hyundai Grandeur’s, the car we are driving.  Trucks come in the light duty size (smaller than a Ford F150) and larger, but not quite to large as 18 wheelers in the US.  Jane became an afficianado of those tiny trucks and could spot them from a large distance.  Porter II and bongo III were very common, but Jane decided we were Bongo III people.  Every time a Porter II made a  frustrating driving decision, Jane said we shouldn’t be surprised.

We had big plans for tonight, but we’ve modified them for an early bedtime.  We have big outdoor adventures landed  tomorrow so we need some sleep.

Speaking of sleep, we’re all hoping that Woody is getting some rest after his big surgery.  We’re thinking about you, Woody!  Speedy Recovery.

So sleepy I’m not sure this makes any sense.  Good night!