Korean Festival

This weekend we decided to venture down to the Korean Festival – kind of an obscure little festival by Sydney standards – and it was a great decision. The decision to ride our bikes was less stellar, given the hilly-ness of the ride and our post-long-run fatigue, but that’s OK.

So we came up to the park where the festival was, and I seriously asked Ben “Wait, what country are we in?” All the people were Korean; the majority of the signs were in Korean; there was Korean music playing; the master-of-ceremonies was speaking Korean (with occasional bits and pieces translated to English by a younger Korean). We had biked 2 miles and suddenly we were in a different country. I kind of felt like we had crashed a large Korean wedding.


And we stuck out like sore thumbs. Not only were we some of the very few white people, but Ben was also one of the tallest people. Within 10 minutes of arriving, we were interviewed by a film crew about what we thought of the festival. Later, someone pin-pointed Ben in the audience and dragged him up on stage to leg-wrestle their Korean leg-wrestling champ, who succeeded in flipping everyone who came up on stage, but I still say Ben put up the best fight.

And he got a prize for loosing

– turned out to be a case of this great orange drink. Didn’t enjoy the extra weight on the bike ride home, but we’ve been enjoying drinking it!

We had some great food, too: spicy chicken with funky noodle-things, dumplings, kimchi (of course), some novel berry drink, and these “pancakes” that are filled with brown sugar – very addicting.

And we accidentally bought a whole bottle of rice wine. You may wonder how we pulled that off, but I will remind you that in regards to communication, we may as well have been in Korea.

So all-in-all, it was a great afternoon!