Chapter 67: "Fish are Friends, And Food"

This past weekend, I went to a lovely ice-fishing festival a couple hours north of Seoul. How to describe it...it was cold. I'll go into that more in a moment.

Anyways, the festival looks like this:


The high was only about 32 degrees, so of course everything was properly frozen over. A big long stretch of river was frozen about 10 or so inches deep, and all the families come and jab holes in the ice and fish through them. There's also ice hockey, ice skating, sledding, and bare hands fishing. Oh yes.

Bare hands fishing wouldn't be so bad, if it was just your hands getting wet. But no, more than just your hands are bare. It's quite the event actually. Everyone changes into shorts and t-shirts provided, and walks out barefoot around a wading pool filled with fish. The pool is surrounded by packed snow and pebbles and an ice wall to keep the gawking spectators at bay. It's even colder than it sounds.

Was I foolish enough to join in? Well, this blog entry wouldn't be as interesting if I wasn't.

Words cannot describe how cold this whole ordeal was. All the foreigners on our tour went at once, and we spent like 3 horrible minutes just standing out there in our shorts and t-shirts, listening to the announcer go on about whatever in Korean. It felt like forever, because we were standing barefoot on ice. Of course, the water is cold enough to freeze over, and the only reason it hasn't is because crazy people keep jumping around in it, looking to catch fish with their bare hands. It went something like this:



In case you were curious, ice and freezing cold water hurts really bad after about, oh, five seconds. I jumped in with everyone else, waded around for a couple of minutes, then got right back out. The pain was a factor, of course, but more disturbing was the lack of pain, if that makes any sense. By then I had lost complete feeling in my feet, and that was weirding me out. As I was climbing out and getting to my feet, I realized I was stepping on chips of ice and sharp pebbles, but I wasn't feeling any of it.

Getting the feeling back wasn't the greatest feeling either, but at least it was a feeling, you know?

We all put our clothes back on and reveled in the sensation of socks and shoes against our toes for a while, before moving on to other things.

I have to say, that was probably the most eventful thing that happened this weekend. We wandered around a little longer, then went back to our lodge, where we had a lovely Korean dinner and a bonfire. The next morning we went on a hike through the mountains, on an old trail in the woods that is used to train Korean soldiers and to off gullible foreign tourists...Getting down the mountain involved hunkering down on our heels and sliding, which was rather fun too.

The lodge had a frozen pond and homemade....things, that you sit on and slide around on the ice with. Good thing I have pictures.


In this photo, some of the people from our tour are having a race with some elderly Korean people, who are shockingly spry.

So, that's about it. This is the last tour of Korea I'll be doing, as I'm coming home in 3 weeks. Weird.....