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Published: February 9th 2012
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Ranked in the top 3 winter festivals in Korea, Hwacheon Ice Festival is popular among Koreans and foreigners alike. For the past 7 years, thousands of people have flocked to Hwacheon to attend this chilly festival and this year it was my turn.
First things first – Hwacheon is in Gangwon Do province (yes the one I live in!) which is known for its deep winter freeze. Saying it’s cold is an understatement – rather it chills you to the bone and even when you're wearing 2 pairs of socks, 5 jumpers (or jackets) AND boots you can still feel the cold. On the plus side, festivals like this one help all us waygooks make the most of the chilly weather, and keep our minds off the cold.
We arrived and instantly found ourselves amused by the barrage of winter themed activities on offer. I'm talking family after family on sleighs, people flying down mountains on sledges and slides, and my personal favourite ATVs manned by Korean drivers, driving crazily around and spinning people violently in a circle. Vomit inducing? Yes. But it looked fun as hell. My friends and I bought ourselves a ticket for this ‘ride’ immediately and
hoped onto the ATV with nervous excitement. Low and behold it was 5 straight minutes of twists and turns, with a few hectic slams of the breaks to make us feel like we were about to hit the wall and die!
Next it was time for what Hwacheon is famous for– its spectacular ice fishing!
It was mountain trout, known in Korean as sancheoneo or ‘Queen of the Valleys’ we were fishing for. We all purchased plastic rods that had little fish attached to them to use as bait (the irony!) and entered a special part of the ice festival reserved for foreigners – and what I suspect was an attempt by the organisers to make sure we had a chance of catching fish as not many foreigners were likely to have fished in these kind of conditions before. And the organisers would hardly want us to walk away empty handed. There were many small holes drilled through about 40 c m of thick ice, and we were each sent to a different hole to find our fortune .
What begun with incredible excitement soon became a dull roar, otherwise known as the 'waiting game' as none of
us had any bites on our rod, in fact the mountain trout seemed to have heard us coming and vanished. Luckily, some Korean fishing experts, or just Korean men wandering around gave us some much needed advice, and we learnt it is best to slowly lower your rod into the icy water, and then quickly pull it up. This gave us hope once more, although standing in sub zero temperatures pulling a rod up and down wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. But I persevered and suddenly felt a tugging on my fishing line that got me VERY, very excited! Safe to say, a local fishing expert came over, and talk about bursting my bubble as he informed me it was my bait that had caught on the ice, not my first mountain trout!
My friend was the first to feel the bite of a fish, and boy did she scream to let us know she had caught something! I quickly got my camera ready to capture my friend’s great moment. It was a tiny little thing I have to say, gasping for air from its equally tiny mouth but it was still our first fish caught! And we
were very proud of it. I also had to laugh at the small child beside us who managed to catch a fish with his father no less than FIVE minutes after arriving, and then proceeded to hit the hell out of it to kill it with no remorse. This child does NOT stuff around!
That was the first fish of the day, and as the sun threatened to leave us, a few more were caught, although sadly I can’t confess to catching one, as much as I pulled that damn rod back and forth.
The next part was the eating part – and this is where things got really interesting. We took our catch to the barbecue area where we were greeted by a life-sized bear in a police uniform ‘supervising’ the cooking. We grabbed our fish, and a few more our kind neighbors had gifted to us, and thrust them onto the barbecue. They cooked away, and as the sun went down we smelt the fish cooking and toasted the day overlooking a huge fish made of lights on the hill.
Eating time! We were lucky enough to have two Koreans with us aka two expert
fish de-boners who did an absolutely stellar job of deboning each and every fish. They worked carefully – using nothing more than a pair of wooden chopsticks – to take out all the bones from the head to the tail, leaving us with nothing but delicious chunks of mountain trout sautéed in delicious juices. We also had some mushrooms thrown in for good measure, and what Korean meal would be complete without Dakbokee (rice cakes in a tomato sauce). The fish kept coming, and we kept eating. Despite seeing our breaths in the cool winter’s air, the warmth and smoke from the barbecue kept us happy and warm until the last of the fish was devoured.
It was then onto the World Cup Winter City Plaza for the ice sculpture exhibition. It took a team of 40 people six months to create all the sculptures! There were huge sculptures of all shapes and sizes – from a life-sized bar complete with bar stools and tables, to a bus with plenty of seats, to a car, cartoon characters and much more. Photos were taken, as we freezed our asses off on the ‘bus’ and again on the ‘bar stools’. I’ve
got one sound to say to you: “brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”.
It was then time to grab a late night snack and check out the amazing lights along the main street. Our snacks came in the form of warm waffles with jam and cream. Delicious! And I had a delightful moment where we viewed the lights shining in the streets, just as one of my favourite songs started playing in the background – plastic trees by Radiohead I think it was.
Oh, and I nearly forgot, another highlight of the day would have to be the make-shift corridor you had to go through to enter the festival. Let’s just say – much like watching people get off chair lifts at ski resorts provides much entertainment – so too, does watching person after person navigate their way through an icy multi-coloured corridor, much like an Igloo. It was dangerously slippery to say the least, and I swear every second person was gripping the freezing cold sides of the thing just to keep themselves upright. I had some near misses too.
The bus ride home soothed the soul as the heating was cranked right up – and the water that had
been soaking into my shoes started to dry. Hwacheon Ice Festival is famous on a world scale, and lord I can see why. My only ‘regret’ is that I didn’t attempt the great big slide – but you know what? At the time I could think of nothing worse, and luckily I had some game friends who were more than willing to slide down on their bums (which I can imagine were numb afterwards) so we could happily say we tried a great array of things on offer at the ice festival.
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