The Lee Hyoseok Buckwheat Festival (named after his super famous in Korea short story "When Buckwheat Blossoms Bloom") was on this weekend, so the wife and I decamped.
The bus ride down was uneventful, thankfully a full
half-hour shorter than the guidebooks said. We got to Jangpyeong (the nearest town with an intercity bus station) and found a
hotel that was basically right across the street from the train station. There
is also another hotel on the main street, on the edge of town. From the outside
it appeared more modern, but we had already got a room, so we were set. When
our attempts to order a pizza without phoning the order in were rebuffed, we
went to the Discount Mart and got crackers and cheese. Yvonne got a vat of some
kind of hideous meat-product, and proceeded, with several crackers, to demolish
the thing. This was very good for me, since the stuff smelled like
monkey-anuses (or what I imagine they would smell like). While we shopped for
this stuff a woman began chatting us up, and introduced us to two young girls
who, she said, would be serving as hospitality guides at the festival. We
laughed and promised to look for them.
In the morning it was a quick cab ride (about 8 chun, as the
rates are a bit higher) to the festival
There are multiple ways in, but if you head in from the main
strip of Bongpyeon you go through a long alley of pochang-type stalls, selling
food, shoes, and other assorted things. I took one picture of Yvonne standing
by the entrance and in protest my camera committed suicide!
Consequently all the photos here are
from my iPhone.
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| The Last Photo! |
Walk through the parking lot and you have the choice of two
bridges, one all of stones, the other occasionally bridged by multiple lengths
of thin tree trunks. For the less adventurous, there is also a fully modern
bridge to the right.
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| Buckwheat in its natural state |
Across the bridge you trek over some wood paths – narrow
when there are multitudes of people, past a couple of pens with sheep and
donkeys. Then it is up some stairs to a raised wood walkway to the left that
meanders through the fields of buckwheat (pretty impressive in bloom) and past
a variety of goofy photo opportunities with decorated chairs, benches, and
cutouts of various kinds. You can follow this to the left until it peters out,
and then loop back, up against the back of the park, past several restaurants.
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| The Ultra Confusing sign of schizophrenia (Note - 2 "You are here" notations^^) |
Then it is back down to the road, and the pathway that leads
up a short but often sharp trail (this is to the far left of the park, as you
look at the park from the entrance).
This path leads up to the munhakwan, which charges a nominal fee (2 chun
and lower) for entrance. There is also a funky little teahouse where 3 chun
buys you a glass of maemil tea. One wall is covered in books, all of which are
in Korean.
The museum is kind of cool, although only one little bit is
in English and don’t expect the staff to have any English at all. It begins
with Lee Hyoseok’s history and literature, and as you work your way around it
counter-clockwise you soon enter a section on the history and uses of buckwheat
(food, fabric, pillow-stuffing). It’s kind of cool, particularly the
photo-essay on how buckwheat jelly (more like Jello, actually) is made –
buckwheat jelly is a pretty regular form of banchan on tables around Korea, and
I had no idea it was made of buckwheat.
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| The Museum Itself |
Above the teahouse and museum there is a trail that runs the
upper edge of the park and in a lovely little grass glen, there is another
trail that runs through some beautiful woods, above the back of the park and
off to god knows where. As it had just rained, the woods were overflowing with
mushrooms and various kinds of fungi, but strangely not one ajumma could be
seen picking them.
Back down to the front of the park and over the ‘real’
bridge and you come to the entertainment and food section of the festival.
There were about 8 booths selling 8 versions of things buckwheat. I can say
that the buckwheat makkeolli tasted just the same as any other makkeolli, but
the buckwheat bread is quite good. This is right adjacent to Gasan Park, which
is a small square of greenery in the middle of town.
Then we walked to the edge of town in search of some
non-buckwheat late-lunch. At the very edge of town, like a whorehouse, biker
bar, or Republican Party campaign office, the BBQ’s hung out in shame, clustered
against their more popular buckwheat-based restaurants.
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| PSY is everywhere |
A look at Naver maps the day before had shown a couple of
pensions out that way, and so, with dinner destination set, we wandered out a
country road about 200 yards before seeing about 6 signs advertising pensions
to the left, and off we went, across a bridge and to the first pensions. One
was up on a hill and looked pricey. The other was by a river, four little
abutting cottages, and it was only 80 chun a night. There was only one room
with a bed, which Yvonne wanted, but it was not ready. So, we left our stuff
and wandered back and had dinner at a restaurant that had a very live and very
big cow tethered in front of it.
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| This lucky cow is the restaurant's mascot and we later saw him being driven somewhere in the bed of a pickup truck |
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| I have an idea for a clever caption that would result in Yvonne killing me. |
The pension was totally awesome and one of the proprietors
으나 speaks brilliant
English. So when you look at this website: http://www.mdarae.com/
and only see Korean, don’t freak out… give them a call or send an email. You
probably wouldn’t want to stay here in summer as it is electric-fan only, but
in temperate weather it is great, and within easy walking distance of the
fairly small “downtown” of the town.
Late-lunch was good, and we went back to the pension to wait
for evening. At about 4:30 we headed out back to the entertainment/food area,
and as we sat there, lo and behold, the two girls from the night before came up
to us and offered to take us sight-seeing.
Turns out they were 15 year-old best friends, and after the
initial bouts of shy giggling (pretty funny, considering they rousted us) they
turned out to be really good guides and happy to practice their English and let
me practice my Korean.
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| Yvonne and our Canny Native Guides |
Then it was back to the pension and perhaps the stupidest
thing I have ever seen on TV, “Dinosaur Park.” The premise of the show was that some amusement park had a
time machine and was going back in time to trap prehistoric critters through a
“time portal.” But out intrepid heroes didn’t just go back to ANY time, instead
they chose to go back just prior to the asteroid-strike that killed the
dinosaurs. This seemed
unnecessarily risky to me, but what do I know. Other ludicrosity included a man
in shorts and boots keeping up with Tyrannosaurus Rex just after the narrator
has cheerily informed us that the T-rex can travel at speeds of up to 40 miles
an hour. The “Dinosaur Park” had ‘enclosures’ made of sapling-trunks roped
together, and in at least one case the fence was less than the height of the
ostrich-like creatures it was supposed to contain.
Yvonne, needless to say, was entranced!
The next day we talked to the nice people at the pension,
then walked into town for some coffee and buckwheat bread.
It took a second to catch a taxi, and we got to the
Jangpyeong Terminal about 20 minutes before the next bus.
Happily, there were seats available
(one weird thing about inter-city buses is that you have to buy your tickets on
the day) and we were off to Seoul.
Two more pics of Yvonne
