Kyle in Korea

The International Mask Dance Festival is the biggest event in Andong each year. I had a cold for much of the festival this year, but still got out to some cool things. I saw dances from 5-6 countries, but by far the most interesting was Israel:

Ann almost got sucked up an teleported or something by one of those grey tubes that invaded the crowd.

At all the festivals in Korea there’s roasting pigs. Somehow I still havn’t tried it.

But I did get my picture taken with some enormous beer can mascots that were wandering the festival grounds, shaking the hands of children and mugging for cameras.

Here we are sitting in stands of the mask dance stadium. We had a small brush with fame after one of the local news networks filmed us watching a dance in the crowd. On Monday we were famous at school. And then on Tuesday we weren’t.

Ann wasn’t kissing me when they filmed us for TV, though… Actually, on second thought, maybe that’s why everyone was laughing on Monday when they said they saw us on TV!

Here’s some video of a couple other mask dances we attended. Here’s India:

And here’s Taiwan:

And finally on the last Saturday of the festival there’s a fireworks show at Hahoe Village, which is a small village of traditional houses about 30 minutes outside of Andong. It’s a beautiful place, almost like an island wrapped up by a river with a small land connection. On one part, on the other side of the river there’s a tall bluff and cliff.

It’s an absolute travesty that the lights didn’t show up properly on my camera, but they rolled “boulders” of fire down the cliff, and stretched five lines from the banks of the river to the far side of the cliffs, and lit the lines on fire, which miraculously burned for well over 2 hours, dropping a steady stream of orange embers onto the beach below. It was breathtaking in person, but hardly registered on camera. At the end of the night, after most everyone had gone home, we stayed and walked around the village. The firework lines had been left to burn out, but were still going strong. We walked underneath them and just looked up, standing in between the lines. Looking up, the embers took over my whole field of view, and the sky was filled with snowflakes delicately aflame.