another bizarre day trip to Gwangju

I woke up today feeling very sick. After spending the morning lying around on the couch, I decided that I didn't want to regret a day wasted sitting around the house. We had plans to go to the Gwangju Kimchi Festival with the other teachers and I had a feeling that I would regret missing it. The festival is a five day annual event celebrating kimchi, the most traditional of Korean foods. Kimchi is a spicy fermented dish made from different vegetables, usually some type of cabbage, onion or pepper, and a mixture of garlic, chili peppers and ginger. Kimchi is served with every meal at any restaurant that serves Korean food, whether you want it or not. Apparently, this festival is famous and draws a crowd from around the world, but I hadn't heard of it before I arrived in Korea. It was important enough, though, to be the featured attraction mentioned next to Gwangju on the "Travel Korea" map hanging in our kitchen. I doubted that we would get another chance to see the festival, as tommorow is our first wedding anniversary and I doubted that we would choose to spend it trying to figure out how to get to navigate Gwangju by ourselves.

I spent the hour-long bus ride into the city focused on not throwing up, as the ride was characteristically bumpy and jerky. Busses here regularly cut off, and are cut off by, other vehicles as they swerve through three lanes of traffic and slam on the breaks to pick up passengers. I was glad when I set foot on solid ground again, but it took awhile before I felt alright. After a few minutes of walking around, we came to the conclusion that we didn't know where we were going, so we hailed a taxi. Saying "kimchi festival" got us a nod and within a few minutes we were there, and the ride cost us less than a couple dollars. The festival was within sight of the World Cup stadium that had hosted the competition in 2002. Our first stop at the festival was the information desk, where we were given pamphlets in english highlighting the different areas. After a minute or so of standing around, we were approached by a man who introduced himself as a volunteer translator that was going to guide us around the festival for free. We were hungry, but we couldn't convey that before he suggested that our first stop be a nearby tent where we would play a game. In that tent, people were gathered around a table competing in teams to finish the puzzle fastest. At the end, everyone clapped and both the winners and losers received the prize of a six-piece tupperware set.

The next tents that we visited sold foods of all different types and each of them offered free samples. The first was selling different baked and fried breads. A girl yelled loudly and emphatically encouraged me to try these deep-fried balls of pounded rice filled with sweet red bean paste. They were delicious, so I bought a few and not long after eating them I was starting to feel a lot less sick. The other tents were selling things like fruit wine, specially-prepared seaweed, flat cakes of dried fish, ginseng candies and all sorts of weird baked desserts and other things that I had no way of recognizing. I sampled most of the things, but none were as good as the pounded rice balls.

After this, we went into a building with our tour guide. In there, we saw a bunch of display cases featuring different types of kimchi; complete with a photo of the chef and some sort of explanation written in Korean. Our guide couldn't speak english that well, so the explanations we got were pretty basic until Leta struck up a conversation with an old lady that was volunteering at the festival as a Japanese translator. We found out which ones were more spicy and which were more sour and which were the cheapest to make and which were rarely eaten because the ingredients were too expensive. They invited us to watch some type of show or presentation, but we declined as we were getting hungry.

Next we visited the main pavillion, where kimchi of all types was being made, sampled and sold in all of the hundred-odd stalls. Leta and I were the only ones interested in sampling the kimchi, as apparently it was too spicy for the other teachers. I couldn't tell the difference between most of the different types of kimchi, except that some types tasted fresher than others. The others were waiting for us outside and I left regretting that I hadn't bought some to bring home. Our next stop was the area with tents selling souvenirs. I looked around a bit and decided impulsively to buy this cool little hand-painted figurine of a little Korean boy dressed in the traditional costume of a king. On our way out of the festival, I bought some more of those pounded rice balls for the road. I was struck at this point by how bizarre our experience of the festival had been. The whole thing had been a disjointed array of eclectic situations that only seemed to fit together by the fact that they were all somewhere between disorienting, fascinating and pointless. It was definitely a good time.

Our tour guide let us know that there were no restaurants near the festival and that we would have to go downtown if we wanted to find some dinner. As we left, it dawned on me how strange we all must look: five foreigners lugging around identical large boxes of 6-piece tupperware sets. At this point, the other teachers had all broken the handles on their boxes and so they had to carry them in both arms as they clumsily tried to balance the bags of other things they had bought. We caught a bus and after a pretty long ride got off at our usual stop near the Provincial Office. Soon after getting off the bus, we noticed that there were hundreds of police lining the sides of the streets dressed in full riot gear. The others felt intimidated and alarmed as we tried for awhile to figure out what was going on. Eventually, they decided to ask one of the officers not in riot gear standing away from the long lines of police. He told us not to worry and that they were there to make sure that an anti-FTA (Free Trade Agreement) rally that was to happen later didn't get out of control.

We continued on and went for dinner at a favorite restaurant of one of the other teachers. The place had very bright lights and obnoxiously vivid colored walls. The food was easy to order as there were pictures on the menu. It was all weird, as expected. I ordered the battered and fried pork patty called 'Donkkas' filled with mozarella cheese and covered in gravy. It tasted sort of like something between chicken cordon bleu and a hot meat sandwich. On the side were a couple mini jam sandwiches, some cold chewy noodles with a spicy sauce and the standard salad of shredded cabbage covered in ketchup. I couldn't finish my meal, but not because I was full. We left, and I stood around while the girls shopped in a few different stores. I had a real cup of coffee for the first time since having arrived in Korea and enjoyed it thoroughly.

On the way back to our bus stop, when we got near where the police had been, we found that the anti-FTA rally had started. It was not what I had expected. People were sitting down on the road (trafficked mostly by pedestrians) singing peaceful songs, holding candles and anti-FTA signs, and wearing Santa Claus hats. They looked to me more like carolers or evangelists than troublemakers that would make so many riot police necessary. Nonetheless, the hundreds of police were standing in ranks a dozen deep with the front lines keeping a solid barrier with their shields. While we were standing there enjoying this spectacle, the protestors stood up and started pressing closer to the wall of shields and shouting things in Korean. I took a few pictures with one of the other teacher's camera and we decided to continue on. Our bus stop was on the other side of the road and while we were waiting for the 555 bus, we saw the rally on the other side of the road start to get violent. People had started throwing trash at the police and one man was using an empty plastic bottle as a weapon against the police. There was shouting and the police started using their shields to beat back the crowd. At that point, our bus came.

The day had seemed really long and everyone was tired, despite the fact that the whole trip from the time we left Naju until we got back had only been six hours; with almost half of that spent on busses. For some reason, the absurdity of it all had made the experience sort of timeless the way that vivid memories become after a year or two. It's these kinds of experiences that help make the monotony my identical workdays more palatable.

That's enough for now.