Too hot for TV

I went to the Andong Mask Dance Festival this Sunday. I took a lot of pictures so check those out. I also posted three pictures on this site so scroll down to see those.

I went to the festival with my coworker, Nicole, and her friend from the college years, Tara. Tara also teaches in Ulsan. We left Ulsan at 6 in the morning because we thought we had f 4 hour bus ride ahead of us. I normally cannot sleep until it's night time but I passed out on the bus, with the occasional wake-up to save myself from falling into the bus aisle or to clean up my slobber. The bus arrived in Angdong two hours after we left Ulsan. We got to the festival before most of the craft tents were open for business. So we walked around to the see all the tents that were open. Then later, when all the tents were open we walked around to all the tents, seeing many of them for the second time. So, as everyone can imagine, I was having the time of my life looking at knicknacks, trinkets, and, as the two girls said, "cute" stuff. I would have bought a soda and sat down to people watch, but I was afraid the girls would forget about me and leave me at a strange festival in a strange town.

The dancing and music at the festival was entertaining. The Koreans, Taiwanes, and Venezualians each put on very good shows. The final show of the night was from the troupe from Jordan. After seen great performances from the previous three groups I was expecting the same from Jordan. However, the show consisted of one man in a bright green silk shirt telling the audience to clap, a man with a hand-held drum who spun really fast as he was banging his drum, and a line of four guys doing the same line dance repeatidly. No one in the group knew what to do. The man in the green shirt would tell the audience to clap, but Koreans have no rythem and they failed to please him. So he grabbed the microphone and yelled something in Jordanian or Arabic. The embarassed look on his face showed that he realized what he had done. So he yelled in English, "Listen to me," so I obeyed, but he didn't say anything else. He and the spinning drummer also went into the crowd often, which always excited the Koreans. The man would bring kids on stage and motion them to follow what the line of dancing guys were doing, but since the guys didn't even know what they were doing the kids just stood there. After a couple of minutes the man would shoo the kids of stage so the drummer could resume his spinning. And if you can't picture the spinning, remember when you were a kid and you would spin so uncontrollably fast that the only reason why you didn't fall was because your body couldn't decide what direction to fall in. That is what the drummer was doing.

Koreans don't wait in line. Especially for bathroom stalls. This angers Nicole to a great extent. Every time she uses a public restroom she comes out furious, with a story of how she was pushed as she was walking into a vacant stall by a woman who then stole the stall. This normally happens a few times each visit to the bathroom. So after she went to the washroom, as Canucks say, at the festival she was in a very foul mood. She was asked by a Korean lady to fill out a survey about the festival and how to improve it. It had two lines for complaints. She didn't put anything. But afterwards, Nicole, Tara, and I were standing around and Nicole was venting about the toilet stealing. She said, "Hey, do you think I could get my survey back? I have a complaint. Well, actually I have about...how many people live in Korea? Thirty-nine million? I have thirty-nine million complaints." Just as she finished I looked away from her and saw that we were being filmed by a Korean TV station. There is absolutely no way the camerman did not pick up her tirade because he was only about four feet away. This guy must've gone to special training to be able to sneak up like that. But Nicole was not worried about being shown on TV and having her words written with Korean subtitles because she felt that the TV station would never put anything negative about Korea on air. So instead of what she said, the subtitles will probably have her say, "On a scale from 1 to awesome, this festival is super-great."