School field trip !
01.12.2009 10 °C
We had another great weekend. My school invited us out on a field trip and we went to a film set ! It wasn't your usual run of the mill film set though it was a life-size medieval Korean town with a royal palace to boot ! It reminded us of the Forbidden city it was so good.
Afterwards we went to a very old forest called Bijarim which means nutmeg tree and indeed nutmeg trees abound in this well-conserved forest. The sunlightbreaking through the forest canopy lit up the last embers of autumnal colours of the maple tress and other species and gave dramatic effect to the oldest tree in South Korea some 813 years old which stood majestically at the forest's heart ! A beautiful sight !
After we had a duck feast which was delciious.
On Sunday we spent an enjoyable day indoors at home reading and watching films. We saw a 1980 film called "The Gods Must be crazy !" which is a brilliant study of the evolution of mankind from hunter gatherers to "civilised" people and of the Khois of the Kalihari desert who still lead hunter gatherer lifestyles.
I found out about this film in Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" which I really recommend. He explains in brief that some groups of humans evolved from nomadic hunter gatherers to sedentary town and city dwellers not because they were superior in intelligence than others but because environmental conditions favoured this transformation in some parts of the world and not in others that's why we still have hunter gatherers in the Kalihari and elsewhere in the world and magacities in other parts of the world.
It's of prime importance that we protect and preserve these people who still lead hunter gatherer lifestyles because they are our last link to our ancestral way of life which was more in harmony with Nature than it is at the present time. We can learn so much from these people (as Ray Mears has so perfectly illustrated)
such us the ancestral intellignece of how to survive in the wild and how to live in harmony with Nature which we've lost. It's also of major importance in order to preserve the multiplicity of people, language and culture in the world.
Posted by JBarker 09:46 Archived in South Korea Tagged living_abroad