Chungnam Cherry Blossom Festival

A couple weeks ago the trees finally blossomed!  The cherry trees are very famous here.  It seems that any place with a lot of cherry trees has a festival when they bloom.  I have heard people say it is one of the few good things that came from Japan.
In our town, one of the local universities has a nice abundance of cherry trees.  They have a festival every spring.  We wanted to see what Korea's idea of a festival was, so we decided to go. 

We went a little late and it was starting to get dark.  They turned on lots and lots of spotlights to shine up at the cherry blossoms.  It was very beautiful.  People were taking pictures everywhere.  All the lower blossoms ended up behind someone's ear.

There were some booths from the college making plaster casts or pottery, but mostly there were food booths.  They had corn on a stick, sugar-filled bread, cotton candy (or candy floss as my British friend calls it), roasted chestnuts, ice cream, Turkish kabobs (it was more like a Turkish taco), and roasted silk worms.  We had to try the worms for the sake of culture.  The texture wasn't that bad, but there was something about the taste that reminded me of the fruit fly experiments from genetics class.  They even sold boiled crabs that a friend of ours treated us to.

We found out that festivals do not usually have parades, but are usually several days long.  Most aren't that big, but are fun.  Also, don't get the bugs.

Fishies

Riley and I were out running the other day (yes, I have taken up running even though I still don't like it very much.  It is good for me, though, and it has some benefits as you will see shortly).  We run along a river where they have converted the banks into and long bike and running track.  Its a good place to run and travel around town without going on the sidewalks through the city.  My favorite part about the rivers is that they are the wildest places I have seen in the city.  They are always full of ducks, egrets, and herons with the occasional grebe!  This is one of the things that makes running ok, it is a good excuse to see the waterfowl in the river.
Back to the story, Riley ran ahead of me like usual, and I started watching the water looking for interesting ducks.  It was a drizzly day, so there weren't as many people out as usual.  Instead of dabbling ducks, I saw lots of splashing.  The water where the splashing was is very shallow, and I started seeing fins sticking out of the splashing.  It was a giant fish!  Actually, 4 giant fish!  I don't know what they were doing, but they were very determined about doing it.  I kept running, but every 30 meters or so (yes, I am started to convert to metric) I saw more splashing fish!  I finally had to stop and figure out what was going on, but all I know is that there were usually two fish splashing together.  They are the biggest fish I have ever seen in our urban river.  I'm glad they can live there.  They were about 1.5-2 ft long (ok, maybe not all metric). 
These little incidents help keep me running and in shape.

Election Day

Here in Korea, whenever there is an election, people get a holiday from work and classes!  This is so people will have time to vote, but for those of us who are not Daejeon citizens its a surprise holiday!  The election campaigning is nice here because its in a different language.  I think the most interesting part is that the colors for different parties range from yellow to blue and pink.  Its strange not just seeing red, white, and blue posters.  I saw people in red jackets stand on the side of the road and wave at people, and we also saw these trucks with either a video or a strange built into the side advertising one of the parties, but of course it was in Korean and sounded just like the trucks that broadcast food sales.  This election was for congressmen I believe, and all I know is the major party won. 

Riley had a paper to write, so I grabbed a camera and explored the woods on campus.  In Korea, almost all mountains (and hills) are left to the forests.  I think this is mainly due to the fact all the hill are really steep.  It would be really hard to build anything on the slopes, so there are hiking trails on all the mountains instead (with exercise equipment at the top).  The one on campus is small, but the flowers have started to bloom and I wanted pictures.  Also, for some reason all the egrets and herons in the area decided our mountain was where they wanted to raise their kids.  One part of the mountain is covered in giant white birds building nests.  While exploring and trying to get a good picture of the egrets, I went off the trail and scared up a Korean deer!  I have no idea how a deer lives on a mountain in the middle of a fenced-in college campus.  It was short and stocky, nothing like a white-tailed deer.  Two days later I met someone who hikes all the time in Korea and it took him 2 and a half years to see a deer.  It only took me 7 months!  Now I just need to see a Raccoon Dog...

Koreans are Church Crazy

Somehow, Riley and I found ourselves trying to sing "Give Thanks" in Chinese at 5am this morning.  This is not an easy thing to do. 
It all started when Riley got "volunteered" by someone to help with the special music at the 5:30am service that they have at church EVERY DAY!  They apparently takes turns doing special music and it was the foreign ministries' turn to do it.  Why people get up early every day to go to an hour long service at 5:30 in the morning is beyond me.  Riley's not sure how we ended up getting involved either, at least it was just one day.  We sang the song first in English, then Chinese, and then Korean.  The Korean wasn't too bad since I do know how to pronounce it, but I have no idea how to pronounce the Chinese ryn rion zu du, ping choing, xian xie, etc.  We tried to listen to the Chinese people, but I think most of us non-Chinese just sang very quietly.  The service was all in Korean, good practice for understanding Korean if we had been more awake.  I just managed to not fall asleep during the sermon, then we got home at 6:30 and went back to sleep.  Hopefully it will be a long time before its our turn to do the special music again.