The Festival that Wasnt-Sorak-san

Pictures-
1. These are prayer tablets, written with the hopes and reams of many people stacked outside a statue of Buddha.
2-4. Some shots of a temple on a midwinter day.
5. The mountains of Sorak-san with some weather moving in.

The Festival that Wasn’t

Sorak Snow Festival 2007

One of the things we look forward to here in Korea is the plethora of festivals. Every weekend it seems there is a new festival celebrating something, kimchi, fish, ice, and mushrooms. It seems like everything on the peninsula has a festival for it. Down south they even have a mud festival in the early summer and a festival celebrating the lowest tide of the year where some mudflats get exposed to the salt air.

Here in Sokcho we are lucky enough to have a snow festival celebrating, you guessed it, snow, and on a bitterly cold day Paul, Aubrey, and I headed out to the Sorak-san Park with great excitement, looking forward to a real festival atmosphere.

When we got off the bus at the entrance to the park we found our way in with what seemed a smallish crowd of people, at least for a Korean festival, and headed towards the main clearing where we expected to see tents and displays showing the beauty of the winter season. We were sorely disappointed.

I don’t know about you but when I hear the words “snow” and “festival” put together I expect it to be in the winter, with the possibility of some poor weather. Where I come from this means that any festival in the winter would have made provisions for cold, wind, and snow. Twenty-degree temperatures with a little wind would not have slowed things down one bit. One only has to look at the eelpout festival to see a true winter festival.

Here in Korea it is another thing entirely. Throw a little wind and chill into the mix and bang, no festival. Down come the tents! The exhibits, well they are just a distant memory. In other words, the festival was, well it wasn’t.

Needless to say, while the festival did kind of suck, well the fact that there was no festival sucked, I did get some great pictures of what is fast becoming my favorite part of Korea in the winter.