Taebaek Snow Festival

First of all, check out my photos! There are now pictures from my teacher’s trip to Tongyeong and the Snow Festival, as well as updates to the ‘Halloween in Seoul’ and ‘Busan Fireworks Festival’ albums. http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg takes you to all of my albums.

Last Sunday, the 24th, I joined an Eagle Tour trip to the Taebaek Snow Festival. Eagle Tour is pretty much a one-man operation run by Eric, a Korean who speaks English and just puts together short trips for foreigners in Daegu. As the Facebook page for Eagle Tour says, “We provide domestic/overseas tour for foreigner in Korea. As you know that korea have many beautiful, historic place…but you hard to get there anytime alone… If you want go to anywhere, I'll prepare good way…” That about sums it up. Eric is really nice and the whole day, including the bus and festival entry fee, was only 25,000 won.

Taebaek is both the name of a town and a mountain range that runs along the eastern coast of the entire Korean peninsula. The festival was of course in the town of Taebaek, which is in the province of Gangwon-do, in north-eastern Korea. We left Daegu around 6:30am for the 3 ½ - 4 hour bus ride. There were around 25 of us (both Westerners and Koreans) and I knew about five people, including my good friends Jeannine and Diana.

Taebaek was really freaking cold – we were several hours north, of course, and it was also a very windy day in the mountains. I wore a long-sleeved t-shirt and two sweatshirts under my coat, Under Armour under my jeans, huge fuzzy socks in huge fuzzy boots, and two pairs of mittens. With all this on it wasn’t actually too bad, and we managed to stay outside most of the day. We also had a good, if self-righteous, time making fun of the Korean girls wearing mini-skirts and no coats!

There was actually very little natural snow on the ground, but they brought in tons of it from somewhere to create a sledding hill and cover the ground in certain areas. My pictures definitely look winter wonderland-ish, but it was mostly just loose snow piled up on top of the ice (people were wiping out left and right, and poor Jeannine actually dropped and broke her camera when she slipped).

The festival covered a large area, but there wasn’t as much going on as we had been led to believe. There was hill-sledding (on plastic bags) and dog-sledding, but it was pretty much for little kids. We had the most fun with the ice and snow sculptures. There were dozens of these, and they were really big, very detailed and well-done. As you can tell if you look at my pictures, you could climb on them as well! Jeannine and I spent most of our time cutting in front of children and families to get pictures of or with the sculptures; it was pretty crowded and difficult to get your own picture, which is why I have several nice portraits of Korean families and other people’s cute children.

There was also a big tent with lots of different food stalls – basically Korean fair food – meat on sticks, fried tofu on sticks, red bean dumplings, rice cakes and more. We walked around and tried a bit of everything. After buying a box of dried persimmons (delicious) on the street, we settled in for the long bus ride home. Daegu felt downright tropical after playing in the snow up in the mountains all day!