Sunday, April 29, 2012

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment