Fall, Festivals, and Fun

Hola everyone,

I hope you are having a great end of your weekend! My past week was so busy it blurred right into the weekend, which turned out to be very busy but very fun. It seemed like there was a Gwangju magnet this weekend, as I ended up having six different people come visit and stay the night on my apartment floor between Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. 

For me, the weekend started on Wednesday night, when I ventured downtown for my weekly book club meeting. As I got off my usual bus stop and walked closer, I realized that the main street of downtown was blocked off to traffic, and in its place were three different stages, a kid carnival, and tons of vendors lined up along the sides of the street. I realized that the annual city festival had begun the night before, not on Friday like I'd thought it would start. The festival was called the 7th annual 7080 Chungjang Recollection Festival. The '7080 movement' is the name for Korea's unofficial hippie movement, much like our 1960s and 1970s. The festival uses the name 7080, but it actually encompassed many more aspects of 'recollection,' as it featured many traditional dances alongside international and modern performances. One way they worked the theme into it was by having a street filled with food vendors who sold their food from little stands that were made to look like old fashioned streetcarts and wooden restaurants, lined with black and white pictures of what Gwangju's downtown used to look like. I have a really neat brochure that explains a lot more about the festival...but I'm afraid it's all in Korean, as is their website, so I don't have much more to offer you about the festival. Either way, it was a great excuse for a party and a fun time was had by all. There were tons of performances (dance teams, magicians, some game shows that we couldn't understand but they looked fun anyways, singers, traditional dancers, and comedians), tons of street vendors, and tons of people enjoying themselves.

So, to get back to my Wednesday night, it turned out I had come for the best performance night of the week, as there were some pretty big name K-Pop stars who had come down from Seoul to put on a show. They performed at the impressive outdoor concert stage that took up the entire width of the street. The street was packed when we met at our usual meeting point for book club (we are reading "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave, if any of you are wondering,) and by the time our meeting was over, the concert was going in full swing. I hung around for a while to watch, enjoying the fact that my height enabled me to have a great viewing point from the side of one of the streets. I'm afraid I didn't know any of the songs or artists, but they were fun to watch. One of the guys appeared to be a major heartthrob, based on my observation of all of the screaming girls (and guys?)

On Thursday night two of my friends from Mokpo (about an hour and a half away) had to be in Gwangju bright and early Friday morning to leave for a weekend camp, so they asked if they could come up on Thursday and stay the night. I picked them up at the bus station after school (after scrubbing my floor, as they would be staying the night on the floor mats and covers that came with my apartment,) and then we decided to head straight for downtown. They had heard of a fantastic Nepalese restaurant in Gwangju called First Nepal - very popular with foreigners - that they wanted to try out, so we enjoyed a delicious meal while catching up on our respective teaching jobs. After dinner we walked around to look at all the festivities before heading back for bed (I still had to go to work the next day even though it felt like a weekend.)

Friday at work passed by quickly - I taught three classes in the morning and then two in the afternoon. My students have their midterm exam on Tuesday, so my job was to make sure they had completed all of the dialogue practice covered in the preceding and current chapters. I ended up being more productive than I thought I would be on Friday and got ahead in my lesson planning - always a great feeling. Friday after school was a repeat of Thursday: I met two different friends who teach in Mokpo at the train station, from where we headed straight downtown to go eat at...guesses? First Nepal, of course. It seems to be a rite of passage for all southern South Korea foreign residents to eat at First Nepal when they are in Gwangju - I didn't complain. There were no major concerts or performances like Wednesday night, but the festival was still going full swing - a fun atmosphere. Even though we didn't have to wake up too early the next day, we ended up not staying out that late - it had been a long week for everyone.

Saturday was a day of great coordination and organization, which ended up going smoothly due to the use of our brand new domestic cell phones. First, my friend Sara was coming up from Janghueng in the morning, so she showed up near my house, dropped her stuff off, and then we went to the nearby coffee shop to properly caffienate and to meet Sokhom (my friend who teaches in a school near mine - we live about five minutes away from each other.) The five of us then jumped into a cab and headed across town to check out the annual GIC (Gwangju International Center) Food Festival. There were about 20 different countries represented, and we drooled all over (not literally, don't worry) as we scoped out our options, having to choose among Greek, Indonesian, North American (mac and cheese was one of the items on the menu there) Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Nepalese, Nigerian, Mexican, Turkish, Russian, and Vietnamese. I tried a Greek salad, a Nigerian lentil dish, a bite of Mexican taco, and an Indonesian vegetable salad with delicious peanut sauce. Yum. We sat in the sunshine and enjoyed the international singing and dancing for a bit until it was time to move on. Here's where our coordination came into play: we all took the subway from the Food Festival to the downtown Festival area before splitting off. Lisa and Chad (the couple from Mokpo) were planning to hike the nearby mountain in Gwangju, so I sent them on their way to find the correct bus to take them to the start point. Sara was planning to walk and shop around downtown for a bit, where she was going to meet up with our friend Jason, who was coming up from Mokpo that afternoon. Meanwhile, Sokhom and I headed to SungBin Girls Orphanage, where I have been doing volunteer work on Saturday afternoons. Sokhom decided to check it out and see if she would like doing it as well. We ended up having a ton of fun at the orphanage, (I will post a seperate entry one of these weeks about the volunteering) as it was mural painting day. The girls and volunteers all pitched in and got dirty as we painted one entire side of the playroom with bright cheery colors. The wall was based off of Dr. Seuss' book "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" and though we had to leave a little before it was completely finished, it ended up looking fantastic.

The final phase in our operation on Saturday was to all reconvene for dinner, so Sokhom and I met up with Sara and Jason after the orphanage, and about an hour later Lisa and Chad showed up. Sokhom had to leave to meet some other friends, but then we picked up two of Sara's friends from the area she teaches in, so by the time we made it to Quirinale, a delicious Western-style restaurant, we had a group of (how many people? Were you paying attention? Two plus two plus two minus one plus two) seven people, with plans to meet up with many more teachers later in the evening. Dinner was delicious, and afterwards we did a bit of bar hopping, as there are some really fun 'foreigner bars' in Gwangju. We also checked out more of the performances that were going on due to the festivals. We all made it back safe and sound, and hit the sack (well, they hit the floor) after a fun day and night of festivities.

The next morning we slept in and decided nothing sounded better than a big, hearty breakfast. We were in luck, as there is a restaurant in my city that serves all day English breakfast, mostly for all of the hung over foreigners. The restaurant is run by the same people who own the Underground Grocers, a small little grocery store that imports Western and foreign foods, such as Kraft Mac and Cheese, pasta and pasta sauce, real cheese, Western cereals, snacks, and baking supplies, among others. We headed back downtown to check out the breakfast, (they served real coffee out of a coffeepot, which is actually a luxury in Korea) and we all ended up choosing the Huevos Rancheros instead of the English breakfast. The Huevos pretty much made my day - one of the best Western meals I have had in Korea. I forgot how much I missed Mexican food! After breakfast we decided it was time to part, so we all trooped onto the correct bus to get to the city bus terminal, where we went our separate ways.

It was definitely a busy, but very fun, fast paced weekend - we (the five of us who stayed at my apartment) hadn't all seen each other since our Jeju trip, so it was fun to reunite and catch up on our Korea lives. Our next planned reunion is for Mokpo in three weeks. Next weekend Sara and I are headed to Seoul on Friday evening - it is coming up fast. I remember when we planned it, three weeks seemed like so far away. The month is flying by. 

Time to get started on my new work week - I hope you all had a great fall weekend and I hope your week gets off to a great start! Bye for now!