Sydkorea: Gimje Horizon Festival 05-06 October

A few weeks ago I heard about this festival called Gimje Horizon Festival. IFC Korea organized an opportunity for foreigners to participate in this festival, for free. The festival was organized from the 02-06 of october, but our trip was planned for saturday and sunday.

Saturday morning we all met up in front of the Lemeilleur Jongtown building close to the Gangwhamun station. From KHU there was a few students from Germany and Lithuania and then there was me. Three busses were waiting to departure at 9am, but before we stepped inside, everyone got their own name tag with our countries flags on and a time schedule. Tired as I was, I slept the whole way to Gimje. The trip took us about 3,5 hours and we ended up at the countryside. When we arrived we could all go around the festival area and experience all it had to offer. There was a lot going on, everything from performances, games, culture and traditions. We ended up watching the Tug of War Championship and I must say that we had a lot of fun. The teams were from Japan, Taiwan and Korea.
After walking around we all got our own kite. I must say that it was a bit hard, since it wasn't a windy day. Well, there was actually people who managed to keep their kite in the air for the whole day, so I guess we didn't have skills enough. Then it was dinner time. Since this event was free of charge for us, we all got our own food ticket. While walking around the area, we managed to find some Indian food and we decided to have it for dinner. It was delicious!
The last event of the evening was the torchlight parade. There was a lot of people and after the parade they ended the show with a firework show.
At 10pm we headed to our busses to drive to our motel. Me and Natalie decided to share a couple room. The rooms were cosy and since our dorm life is quite crowded, the first thing we did was running around in our big motel room. We made our bed, on the floor of course, and watched some korean TV-shows.

Sunday morning, where should I start? The communication was quite bad between the organizers and the participants, so our morning started with someone banging on our door screaming: "Check out, bus here!" We were ready in 5 minutes and ran to the bus, and no one has come yet. We waited for everybody to enter the bus and after an half our, we drove to the Gumsan Temple. We took some pictures and had a look at the temple, before we drove all the way back. Breakfast was the next thing on our schedule. In Korea, they eat the same food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. After our heavy breakfast we decided to try on some traditional wedding clothes and it was a nice experience. We didn't have any boys with us, so a nice gentleman from Korea decided to act like our husband. I didn't understand what they were saying, so hopefully I'm not engaged now.
The following event was the Songpeon and Gimbap making contest. There were 10 teams of two, all from different countries.
Next up, Traditional Rice Harvesting Event. This time of the year, its time to harvest the rice from the fields, and we were participating in the opening ceremony. They gave us working clothes and hats, took some photos and after that we started marching to the fields. We were all dancing in a circle and singing songs. We had the opportunity to harvest the rice from the fields and straight ahead we took a nice group photo. They offered us a snack (noodles, egg and sweet potato), because we all did so well.

That was the festival. A lot of funny things happened and I will probably leave that for this time. This trip was nice and I really enjoyed to come away from the big city and get away from all the stress. The funny thing was, that it actually felt like our whole group was a walking advertisement. We had cameras all over us 24/7 and they were also filming to a national channel, so our happy faces will be shown on TV. I'm finally home now, and now the stress starts. I totally forgot how much readings I've got for this week so I better start working on that.