Korean acrobats jumping really high on a teeter totter

Joshua Gill says: "Last year I went to a Korean Folk village in Suwon, South Korea. I took some video and put it on Youtube, this one is my favorite but you're welcome to browse around. "

Korean kids jumping really high on a teeter totter

[#1 posted by SpocksBrain , October 24, 2008 8:09 PM]

Must be how Chun Li got her start.

[#2 posted by Daemon , October 24, 2008 8:32 PM]

Yet another traditional children's park element that will soon vanish from all north american playgrounds.

[#3 posted by Tom Hale , October 24, 2008 8:48 PM]

My teeter totter experiences usually ended with the other guy (the jerk) jumping off while I was on the high end, It was always a painful, humiliating experience. I would run, crying to the kindergarten teacher, she would hug me up close, consoling me amongst her voluptuousness. Then wiping my tears, I would run off to play on the monkey bars. Good times, Good times.

[#4 posted by classic01 , October 24, 2008 10:39 PM]

#3: Traumatized for life. :o)

[#5 posted by mdh , October 24, 2008 11:24 PM]

needs more Benny Hill music.

[#6 posted by PhantomMut , October 25, 2008 1:03 AM]

I am NOT letting my twins see this.

[#7 posted by Sutra , October 25, 2008 8:20 AM]

I wonder if these girls have any clue how far this could take them. This could be their video audition to Cirque du Soleil, for serious.

[#8 posted by rasz , October 25, 2008 9:52 AM]

#7 not really, see this is not US, there are groups like this one in every other village in South Korea. Just like almost every South Korean men trained Taekwondo at one point in his life.

[#9 posted by Sungkyu , October 25, 2008 10:08 AM]

i remember seeing a picture of my mom as a kid in the 1960's and her extended family doing this in Seoul. In post-war Korea, there weren't exactly a lot of avenues for fun and play. Like #8 sez, this was going on all over Korea.

[#10 posted by Anonymous , October 25, 2008 10:34 AM]

they aren't kids. they are just young adults who do this performance everyday at the folk village.

there's a kid's version of the teeter totter in the play area. the kids there definitely don't jump like that.

anyway, the folk village is awesome. it's where alot of historical kdramas are filmed.

[#11 posted by sfazzios , October 25, 2008 10:44 AM]

Female Korean Ronald McDonald!

[#12 posted by WordyGrrl , October 25, 2008 1:40 PM]

The Korean Folk Village is awesome! Went there when I was stationed in Seoul in the early 80s. Nice to see it's still around.

As it was explained to us on the tour, little kids (especially girls) weren't allowed to go outside the village walls. So the teeter totter enabled them to jump high enough to see the outside world.

[#13 posted by sammich , October 25, 2008 7:52 PM]

This is fabulous,marvellous, fantastic and brilliant. But the word is See-Saw.

[#14 posted by FoetusNail , October 25, 2008 9:07 PM]

Teeter totters and see-saws are found on playgrounds, in a circus this is a teeter board act.

And now for something completely different, Victor Kee.

[#15 posted by minamisan , October 26, 2008 3:41 PM]

every time one of them landed I heard a loud wooden *SNAP* in my mind.

[#16 posted by Cool Products , October 27, 2008 6:40 AM]

If my memory serves me correct, I definitely do not remember the teeter totter being THAT fun looking. I totally could have been doing that instead of playing four square.

[#17 posted by Anonymous , October 27, 2008 6:14 PM]

I've read that this traditional pastime, called noltuigi, has a dark side. It dates back to the Choson (or Joeseon) dynasty. After marriage, women were locked in their husbands' family compounds and usually allowed out only once a year to visit their birth families. The "game" allowed them to briefly see over the walls of the compounds.

[#18 posted by Anonymous , October 28, 2008 12:10 AM]

The two women are doing a Korean form of seesawing called neol-ddwigi (널뛰기).

[#19 posted by belgium , October 28, 2008 8:53 AM]

Excuse my ignorance of weird American terms for things, but is teeter-totter the same as a see-saw? (That's what it looks like to me, but you never know)

Teeter-totter sounds like something you should eat.