Festival Season: Rice and Liquor Festival

Next on our list of freakishly fun fall festivals (say that 10 times fast) was the Soju and Rice Cake Festival in the beautiful city of Gyeongju.  After eventually finding our way to the festival (in large part thanks to Dan and his ability to follow simple directions) we stumbled upon a few of our friends from Pohang and decided to enjoy the festival together.

The group for the day. From left to right:  Christie, Brad, Emily,
Leigh, Heather, (new Korean friend that I can't remember his name),
me, Dan

We had quite the successful day that included: making rice cakes (basically mashed up rice with other mysterious ingredients thrown in and are ceremoniously mashed together with a huge wooden lever), enjoying the DOZENS of free samples of soju (a rice liquor) from all of the vendors and wandering around the festival enjoying each others company.

With so many foreigners in the same group we were quite popular with the Koreans at the various stands where you could actually make some of the snacks that Korea is famous for. Other Koreans were pushed out of the way so that the foreigners could be photographed and videotaped for the evening news.  Thankfully, Christie ( the blonde on the left of the picture above) was more photogenic and looked more like the kind of foreigner that most Koreans think we are supposed to look like so she was the favorite for the majority of the shoots.  (Thanks Christie!)

Another great thing about this particular festival was the opportunity to get even more souvenirs for when I come home to America.  For the bargain price of $1, we were given a tiny little soju "shot glass" that was conveniently hung on a little thread so that we could have it within easy drinking access.

Posing with our handy dandy souvenirs

Clearly we have been having a great time at all the freakishly fun fall festivals around Korea.  Keep on the lookout for my next post about the motorcycle shoot that happened last weekend.  We finally got our leather vests and just know that we looked amazing.  Get ready Dad.  After all that leather I may want to get a motorcycle when I get stateside afterall!