Hwacheon Ice Festival

Last weekend I went to an ice festival in Hwacheon, which is a town in South Korea about an hour and a half from Seoul. There were a group of 13 of us who went for the weekend and it was a blast! North Carolina doesn't get much snow or ice, so it was pretty exciting. A huge river was frozen and there were a lot of different things to do. There was a big area to go ice fishing, where there are holes drilled in the ice and you sit with a ice fishing rod hoping for a bite. There were also huge hills and slides to sled down, ice skating, ATVs on the ice, and a huge sculpture made out of snow and ice that you could actually walk inside. I knew some of the people who went but met a lot of new people as well. It's always fun to get out of Seoul for the weekend and the Ice Festival was a great weekend. We stayed in a pretty nice hotel about thirty minutes from the festival and took a cab back and forth.

Our first night in Hwacheon we all went to a typical Korean restaurant/bar, where you sit on the floor around a table and order Korean dishes and alcohol. I tasted some things I haven't had before, like vegetable pancakes and a spicy soup with tofu and vegetables. We hung out and talked forever. The owner of the restaurant brought our her two dogs for us to see, and like typical Korean style, their hair was dyed bright colors like yellow and orange...what a sight!

The next morning we got up at a decent hour and headed to the ice fesival. We walked around all day, went sledding, rode the ATVs and also used these small wooden boards with ice skate blades on the bottom. It was fun but different! You sit on the board and push yourself around on the ice using wooden sticks with picks on the ends. We all felt like kids again! It proved pretty difficult to walk on ice steadily and I slipped several times. Fortunately I avoided busting completely!

There was also a huge street filled with food vendors. The festival was kind of in the middle of nowhere, and the foods were a little different than dishes we were used to. Quail was really popular, but I wasn't brave enough to try it by looks alone. They looked like little birds, which they are, with their heads and feet still attached. A lot of people were roasting big hunks of pork that smelled so good, so that's what we went with and it was excellent. Overall we had a great time and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to go!