It's a pink world ...

Spring has arrived in Korea and it came in a gust of pink. Not only has the rain finally stopped, and the yellow thing has returned to it's place in the sky, but the cherry blossoms are in full bloom ...and they are everywhere. There aren't words to describe just how beautiful this city looks right now.

Last saturday I headed to the north end of Daejeon to place called Sintanjin, with my friend Kristina, to attend the annual cherry blossom festival. I wasn't sure what to expect but I was very excited. I was envisioning cherry blossoms everywhere and walking under a canopy of pink flowers. Imagine my disappointment when I arrived and saw nothing but bare branches and white tents. We quickly learned that because of the cold spring the blossoms hadn't bloomed yet. Basically we were at a cherry blossom festival without any cherry blossoms.

We decided to stay and make the most of the day anyway. There were mile of tents lining the street, all of them offereing a variety of food. The air was ripe with the smell of bbq and chestnuts being roasted. There were giant pigs being cooked over flames, mounds of clams the size of dinner plates and piles of octopus, squids and other sea creatures that I couldn't even name. We wandered the street checking out all the unusual things in every tent. The fact that we seemed to be the only foreigners there did not go unnnoticed and many of the tents owners called out to us in broken english encouraging us to come and try their foods.

We wandered off the street and into the main grounds where the actual festival was being held. The festival is sponsered by and held every year on the grounds of the Korean Tobacco and Ginseng company (strange combination) and I think they are the main industry in Daejeon. On the way into the festival there were booths inside handing out free samples of ginseng tea and bottles of water. Inside there were more cherry blossom trees, minus the blossoms, and I could picture in my mind how pretty it would look in a weeks time.

What surprised me were not only the amount of people but all of the families. Spread across the lawn there were families, kids, parents, grandparents all doing activities together. I don't just mean little kids, but kids of all ages right through high school and they seemed happy to be there. It's not like in Canada where once a kid hits adolescence you have to force them to be seen with their parents. Korea is a very family oriented culture but never was this more apparent to me than here. We had fun watching the different events, including a paper airplane contest, where old men lined up to see who could throw theirs the farthest. We tried some unusual foods including some kind of cucumber drink that tasted like nothing more than the juice out of the pickle jar. I had to force that one down. We wandered for a few hours and went home tired and only mildly disappointed at the the lack of cherry blossoms. However I vowed to return in one week when I knew they would be in bloom.

A week later I returned to the scene of the festival and it looked like a different world. It was exactly the way I imagined it would be with canopies of pink everywhere. What did surprise me was the fact that the white tents were still there. The festival, which was supposed to have ended last week, was still happening. There were still pigs on the bbq's and octopus on the tables and the amount of people there seemed to have doubled in a weeks times. What had changed was that the bare trees were now covered in cherry blossoms. They were everywhere and it was spectacular.

I wandered for an hour or so up and down the streets lined with these pink blossoms, just in awe at the sheer beauty of it.