love, minnie

I painted this! With help from a nice 할머니 (grandmother) of course.

So after graduating from my language course, I was simply exploring Seoul (and beyond, sometimes) at my own time. In fact I tried to only do one thing or visit one place a day as it sometimes take up the whole day because of the travelling or sightseeing. And because I wanted to explore as leisurely as possible, I didn't want to pack my days with too much activities in a day.

The Seoul Global Cultural Center located at Myeongdong (at the building where Forever21 is) actually provides free classes for foreigners. There are cooking, traditional folk painting and calligraphy classes available but I only joined the painting class. All you need to do is to sign up on the website and then show up!

The 할머니s don't really speak English but they are really good at guiding you and showing you the techniques of traditional Korean folk painting. Since I could speak a bit of Korean, they were pretty fascinated with me and tried to engage me a lot.

At each session, you will be given 2 options of drawing to paint on the traditional fan and I chose this simple lotus drawing because it seemed easier, haha. The other option was a tiger with stripes and a lot of intricate details so I decided not to be overly ambitious. I think I finished within 2 hours and the fan was mine to keep.

I attended the class alone and I really enjoyed myself so this is totally an activity one can do alone. :)

Here's the before image of my fan: