Jeonju...... Korea's Sovereign Hill

A two hour transfer to Jeonju formed the basis of todays adventures. Jeonju is a town famous for it's “traditional” quarter. Most of the buildings are built along traditional designs using materials and methods true to a time gone by. Think of it as a Sovereign Hill without the entry fee.

All the stall holders lease shops and buildings to practice the various traditional trades and sell wares to passing tourist, most of whom come from Korea, Japan and other Asian countries,but don't forget to throw in the odd bus of Aussies.

Sunny must be beginning to understand us. Her first instinct was to group us together and guide us through the streets. She has learned that we like to wander off in a place like this to explore on our own and compare notes afterwards, Even though we have joined in a tour, we do not want the full “If it's Tuesday, it must be Rome” syndrome,

Furthermore with a planned tour we actually want some free time/down-time to head off and explore on our own. It must be because we are selfish bastards that enjoy a little time on our own, or perhaps putting it politely are independent enough to relish time to think and explore for ourselves. We appreciate Sunny coming to this understanding of the Australia psyche,

The only downside to todays exploration of Jeonju Cultural Village was being Tuesday in a tourist village, most shops and activities are closed because they need some time off for recreation as much as we do. They have Tuesday off instead of the busy weekend,

It was quite fun wandering the streets and exploring the little meandering lane-ways between houses. Korean traditional homes have a high stone fence daubed with mus and topped with tiles. The alleyways are barely wide enough for a wheelbarrow, so the resulting feel can be a little claustrophobic. One wanders through secretly fearful that you end up in a private residence rather than a craftsman’s studio. Fortunately this is not New York so any danger is due to our wish not to invade privacy, not to have a blade invade our person.

We were given maps written in English, but this tool did not help greatly to orient ourselves. Apparently there is a stream that runs across the entire Jeonju Cultural village. It literally cuts the village in half, but do you think we could find it? We crossed the village several times looking for this stream as it would form the basis of our orientation.

Now I know in Australia we call some pretty small streams 'rivers' and creeks can be nothing more than a gutter, but what we assumed was a gutter overflowed by a burst water main turned out to be our stream. It measured barely a foot across and a couple of centimetres deep. Luckily the water flowing was crisp and clean. Liz was amazed to see a brass plaque on the floor instructing us that this was the Photo Stop. Not sure of what it meant we took photos of people standing on it, standing on it looking downstream and of the plaque itself. That should cover all possibilities.

On the way to lunch we stopped at Jeonju Hanji Paper Mill and Museum. Hanji refers to the base product used for the paper. Most Australian/western paper is made from wood pulp which is harvested from trees. The whole tree is chipped, then broken down further to cellulose fibres in a pulp. The pulp is strained against filters to leave behind the paper we know.

Hanji uses pulp made from the bark of the Mulberry tree. This is bleached before pulping and making into paper. It gives a much whiter and brighter paper than the standard note or photocopy paper. We got to make our own paper. Try our hand at printing on traditional wood blocks and had a tour of the paper museum.

In the museum we had to sit through a film about the history of paper and how it has transformed the world and how important paper is to us all. Liz and I took note and read about the future of the world and paper on our e-books.