March 22: Apricot festival

Well kinda. The Korean is Maehwa, which I believe translates more directly into 'Japanese plum' rather then 'apricot', but in any case...

Lisa and I headed off to Hadong, a town forty minutes away by train, to experience this festival.

The whole point is that the Maehwa trees are blooming. It's gorgeous.

It took us a while to figure out how to get to the actual festival, but we eventually took a taxi about three kilometres out of the town.

The festival contained typical festival things: a mini market, street meat, free samples of plum tea, and a whole pig roasting on a spit.

Lisa and I ate lunch on plastic stools at a makeshift restaurant.

We sat down to listen to a nonet of saxophone players.

We were only mildly surprised that it was really saxophone karaoke to hit tunes, like, "Nobody" by the Wondergirls. *shoots self in face, twice*.

We didn't see any taxis around the festival so we decided to walk the 3km back to the train station.

We realized about half way there that we wouldn't make it in time to catch our train.

We weren't terribly concerned about this as another train was leaving three hours later, but when we saw taxis on the side of the road we went to investigate.

The taxis didn't have any drivers in them, but the men directing traffic had on logos similar to the logos on the taxis.

Lisa approached one of the men asked, "taxi?"

Aburptly traffic controllers started running here and there, presumably looking for taxi drivers.

When no one appeared, we smiled at the men who had tried to help us and started to walk away.

"Wait" we were told, as they spoke urgently into their walkie-talkies.

Thirty seconds later we were on our way to the train station in the back of a police car.

I love Korea.