Heyri Art Village 2014 - Part 1

Hellena knows how much I love art and crafts and she had heard about the Heyri Art Village located in Paju which just happens to be a few short kilometers from the DMZ and North Korea. It is also Hellena's new home since she married. It was about an hour bus ride from Seoul and we rode with Hannah. The bus stopped right in front of the Art Village and we waited for Hellena.

                                                               This was the bathroom.

I was pretty excited until I saw that most of the exhibitions required an entrance fee, anywhere from free to 12,000 WON ($12 USD). The photo above is some of the classes you could take. I'm wondering if they included the entrance fee. So you had to have your wallet handy if there was an artist you wished to visit. I found it really annoying. I wish there was just one entrance fee if anything or that the government would help out with the village. I asked Hannah about it and she told me that one of her best friends works for the government and they are broke. Sounds like my country:)

     There were lots of things to look at that were free so we took advantage of a lot of that.

                                                            A reminder of the Korean war...

                                                  Turning the ugly into something really cool.

I did go into a few places, mostly the ones that were free or very little WON. Rocketman and the girls waited outside.

                                                 Most didn't allow photos but a few did.

 It was hot and humid but don't these two look wonderful. Remember the one of the right was 4 months pregnant with twins at the time.

This was lunch in the Art Village. I loved the artisan ceramic serving dishes. See that kimchi in the left corner? Yep, I ate it all and asked for more in Korea but the girls had to translate my Korean to the server.

                                                 There were a lot of cool things.

We saw quite a bit of construction going on. Did I tell you it was really hot out? Long sleeves, wow!

The bus ride home was full of barbwire. See the mountains is the far distance? The really pale ones? That's North Korea! For real!!! We did see quite a few ROK soldiers watching over the river as we drove back to Seoul.

The barbwire really made me sad for a country where a war was started between Koreans but it didn't stay between Koreans. It became a war between my country (United States and it's allies), China and Russia. So many died and my prayer is that it will never happen again.