culture

Today, my aunt and I picked up Hyun Jun from school and spent the whole day discovering some of Mokpo's culture and history.



First, we visited Mokpo's ceramics museum where I learned a lot about the origins of some of Korea's pottery. A lot of what I learned today I had tried to research in the States and never found sufficient information. So the museum visit was very informative.


an interesting variety of ceramic toilets

After the ceramics museum was a natural history museum. I loved the natural history museum! It was a wonderful review of a lot of what I've learned in my grade school science classes. There were exhibits on dinosaurs, fossils, marine life, insects, plants, mammals, skeletons, evolution, sedimentary rock, continental drift, etc. A very good refresher for anyone interested in ecology, biology, and zoology... Charles Wilson Peale would have been very proud. P.I.T.A, not so much. There was quite a variety of taxidermied animals and a vast collection of dead bugs.





After natural history, we visited Mokpo's history museum. There was a lot of information on the warfare that took place in Mokpo and the arts and culture of Mokpo. There is a very famous art workshop that resides in Mokpo that produced many well-known Korean painters. Very similar to how Europe had it's Royal Academy and Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The art was very beautiful, similar to Chinese brush paintings in style.



Also, the land itself is considered an artist. There was a gigantic collection of stones that naturally resembled various things such as mountains, flowers, famous peoples faces, figures of people and animals, etc.





The cultural part of the museum had exhibits on Mokpo's jewelry, architecture, famous singers, dancers, and fashions. There was also a currency exhibit, which I thought was funny because American currency was on exhibit like it were some strange exotic artifact.
After all the museums, we went to a performance that was showing in Mokpo's cultural center. It was awesome! Musicians played traditional Korean instruments, the names of which I cannot remember but I'm determined to find out. The performances consisted of traditional dance, folklore, and opera.
Hopefully I'll be able to visit more museums and such when I start working here.