Strawberry Festival

On Saturday morning I met up with a girl named LeeAnna, who lives in my building, and her boyfriend John to go to the strawberry festival in Nonsan. I had only met LeeAnna a couple of times before randomly on the street. She told me about the festival and invited me to go. As nobody around here was going to the cherry blossom festival, I decided to go with them. We left around 10 on Saturday morning and went to the Jinju train station. It is very small and feels like something out of Mayberry. I would have taken pictures, but I thought we were coming back by train too and I was planning on taking them then...but we didn't. I will take some eventually.

We sat together and turned the benches so they were facing each other. It's nice to talk, but sucks for leg room. The train in front of ours broke down and we sat on the tracks for awhile. The scenery was nice, but the pictures didn't come out because they were through the window. Because of that delay, we missed our connecting train to Nonsan. Luckily John, being Korean, speaks Korean and was able to get us seats on the next train, plus a discount. At the connection place (I can't remember the name) we got gimbap to take on the train for lunch. We finally got to Nonsan around 3 pm.

Sign outside Nonsan's train station

Nonsan is a tiny town. It has a small Korean army training camp and this festival. Apparently this was the 33rd annual (or at least that's what I guess by the signs). A lady named Laura joined up with us because she didn't know any other people around. She's American, but works in Singapore. Her family lives there and she was in Korea for business and got stuck and wanted something to do, so she took a bus to Nonsan for the festival. She was very nice. We wandered around for a bit, and went through their local market. We had green tea hoddeok (the fried dough things), which didn't taste any different, but were green. I also found out that the insides are brown sugar and/or nut paste.


Fished shaped hoddeok (green teas ones are at the back)

We finally found the festival because of the balloons (and the traffic).

There was a tented area which had some information about strawberries and some crafts. Then we walked around to the tents.

Strawberry plants. Korea grows 5 types: 3 Korean & 2 Japanese

Sign made out of strawberries

Front of the festival area

Earlier in the afternoon they had a cooking competition. I am assuming strawberries were involved somehow. They displayed these items on a table after the judging. They were still handing out awards while we were there so there were a bunch of people in chef's outfits.

They had lots of different types of strawberry food to try. We had jam on toast, spicy strawberry chili paste, rice cake (not like Quaker dry rice cakes, these things taste like glue to me - very sticky), slushies, and of course strawberries. They had strawberry hoddeok and something called strawberry burgers, which I would have liked to try, but because we were late, they were sold out. They were also selling other foods, like kebabs, ice cream (oddly not strawberry), and mushrooms.


LeeAnna and I made soap, which was basically putting some glycerin bits in a measuing cup on a hot plate. They added some hot water, blended up strawberry, food coloring and lemon scent. They you pour it into a mold and let it sit for 30 minutes.

My soap - the yellow dots are seeds

While it was drying, LeeAnna made some jam and decorated a cake. I could have, but it seemed a bit expensive for me. Instead, I met this guy.

Me and a strawberry

They had a really cute headband making stand, but they were for kids. There was actually a fair amount for kids to do, lots of arts and crafts and face painting. John said this was typical of a festival, but actually had a bit more hands-on stuff.

LeeAnna's cake, with a finger swipe from John

Dog with dyed hair. This is not the first dog like this that I have seen. Also wearing a sweater.

There were also people doing this:

There was a zoo of some sort, but it was hastily put together and this giant lizard was pushing his "cage" to try and get to some furry animal next to it. We didn't walk around there and I didn't want to make them go since they seemed bored with it. Also there were lots of snakes and eww.

He kept sticking his tongue through the cage towards that fur ball. Can you say safety hazard?

After we were done crafting, we went to the main stage where they had some drummers playing drums. I think it's odd how they hold their drumsticks.

LeeAnna and I made John watch our stuff while we went to the bathroom. I mention this for 2 reasons - first because Koreans have figured out good porta-potty ratios - 3 girls' "rooms" to 1 guys' and second - for the following conversation:
Me - click
LA - Umm, did you just take a picture in the bathroom?
Me - Yes, but only because the sign on the door says, "Flying Toilet Germs" and it made me laugh. (The picture didn't show up because of the flash and I didn't want to stay in any longer just to take another)
LA - What? Mine doesn't have that sign!

After the drums, we left.

Big strawberry on a pole behind the stage

As we were walking out, a bunch of women dressed up in traditional dress started singing on the stage. Then we went to our hotel. They got a room and I got a seperate room. There are a lot of motels called "Love motels" because they can typically be rented by the hour, if you get my drift (can if you don't, that's why I wrote it that way). But usually they are pretty nice. Ours was called the "Miracle Motel". You could tell it was a love motel because next to the elevator was a vending machine that sold "personal aids". My room was nice except that I didn't have any towels. They did give me a toothbrush a 2 cute little mini toothpastes.

After we dropped our stuff off, we walked around downtown (which is like 3 blocks) and went to dinner. It was an informal place, but had really good food. I didn't take pictures because I didn't want to scare off John and LeeAnna with my odd food picture taking. I had a pork cutlet (John described it as schnitzel and he was about right). It came with cabbage salad (with ketchup on it), cold soba noodles (which spicy chili sauce on them) and rice. We also got some fried mandu, which are dumplings, to share. They were very good - they had pork and cabbage and pepper and were very crispy. On our way back to the motel, we stopped off at the bus station and got tickets home (well to Daejeon). Then we went back to their room and ate half their cake. It tasted similar to strawberry shortcake - yellow cake, whipped cream and strawberries. Then I went back to my room and a festival fireworks display started which I could see very clearly from my window.

In the morning, I got up and met them to try to get the early bus. We missed it by 5 minutes. So we walked around again to kill an hour. We got these giant dumplings for breakfast.

They had the same filling as the mandu, but were steamed, and the dough is different than a Chinese dumpling - more bread-like. We got on the 11am bus to Daejeon, and then got the 12:30 bus back to Jinju. When we got home, we decided to go to the Korean Air Force base in Jinju for their cherry blossom festival - more on that in the next post.