Icheon Rice Festival; Saturday Escape from Seoul

This weekend we attended a festival held in thanksgiving for a good harvest of rice in Icheon, a city about an hour northeast of Seoul. It was refresing to leave the city for several hours for the more mountainous eastern Korea. Icheon is famous for having the best rice in all of Korea (because of the geography and the lack of pollution.) I think that I have yet to develop a refined rice tasting palette, as I was unable to detect anything particularly superior in Icheon rice. It was good though. Rice is good.



These ladies are in traditional dress, hanboks, serving tea (even though we had to sanitize our hands coming into the festival, it was totally ok for us to all drink tea out of the same glass cup.) I like that about Korea.



more scenes from traditional Korea




a sweet little ajuma & ajashi weaving straw into animals




At lunchtime, we walked along the food stalls to find something to eat. Usually in Korea, a restaurant has one or two specialty dishes and little else. We saw
some familiar favorites, like the seafood and green onion pancake pictured below. Since we've eaten those many times, we kept looking.



We saw this lady and what appeared to be deep fried green peppers. Tempted by these tasty looking things, we settled on eating at the place she was working. They had two dishes, one was soup and the other was the fried peppers.



We all ordered soup without knowing what kind it was. One lift of the spoon revealed
this.


The soup was a typical red pepper broth but there were many whole fish with white eyes in it. We thought that they were perhaps eels of some sort because the did not have fins. Later we found out that they were mudfish. Mudfish live among the rice paddies and in really dirty parts of rivers. They are really fast and are considered to have all kinds of health benefits. In traditional stew, they drop them in while they are alive. They crawl into the tofu to escape the heat and die there. Lovely!



We ate some rice and broth and eagerly anticipated the arrival of our fried peppers. You can probably guess what happened next....they weren't peppers, they were deep fried mudfish! Some Korean men were so excited that we were eating it, they gave us some sort of nut or fruit and proceeded to make us try it right in front of them. Of course, we did our best to look like we LOVED all of it! Inside we were making a face like one of the children below.



After the mudfish experience, I got an icecream cone to get the taste out of my mouth and enjoyed the rest of beautiful Icheon. The availability of cheap & tasty icecream cones everywhere in Korea has definitely been a daysaver on many occasions.









The next night our friend invited us over for chili. She had several of her Korean friends over and they were all eating their chili very cautiously and slowly. It resembled the way i "ate" my mudfish stew in a lot of ways. Even when things are hard, it's so special to get to particpate in Korean culture. I want to try harder to do it more. (Ryan is already pretty good at it, but even he couldn't eat the mudfish!)