Hwacheon Ice Festival

Last weekend, our cabin fever was cured when we went with our friends to the Hwacheon Ice Festival!  The city of Hwacheon is about 2 1/2 hours northeast of Seoul, so we took a bus there early Saturday morning, spent the whole day enjoying the ice activities, and then took the bus home that night.  Hwacheon is a little town nestled in a valley, with mountains all around it.  The festival actually took place on the frozen river of the city.  (It was controlled and safe).  It was a really nice day, so we were able to enjoy ourselves without freezing the whole time.  We were glad for a chance to play outside and enjoy a different area of Korea.  Here are some pictures of our ice festival adventures!

There were amazing snow sculptures everywhere!

We walked through a beautiful tunnel that was lit up, and made completely of ice.

Here's me on the frozen river, ready for fun!

We rode on these ice sleds, and raced each other!

The girls on our sled!

There were several sectioned-off ice areas for hockey, human bowling, or any other game you wanted to make up!  This is me in my metal bowl, ready to be pushed into the bowling pins!

At a less populated area of the festival, we found these men driving ice tractors, pulling people in little sleds behind them.  They went pretty fast, and turned quickly so that the people sitting in the furthest sled got whipped around.  We went for a fun ride!

Lunch consisted of warm, spicy, tofu stew, rice, and fried fish. 

Here is the fried fish.  I was not a fan of seeing the faces of the fish before I ate them.

We watched this "Bare-Hand Fishing" competition.  It made me so cold to watch!  These people were catching fish with their hands, and putting them down their shirts... all in freezing cold water!  The guy in the middle has the fish he caught in his mouth.  Gross.

The main event of the ice festival was ice fishing!  We all wanted to be able to say that we've been ice fishing... even if it was sort of an artificial experience, with so many people there, and the river stocked with fish and all!  But we didn't care!  Here's Tim, the skilled fisherman. :)

Me enjoying ice fishing!

Tim caught a fish!!  Ok, so he caught this the moment after they restocked the river about a foot away from him!  But still... he caught a fish!  He looks so proud.  He threw it back into the water, but they did have grills outside where you could cook what you caught if you wanted to.  

The girls and a big fish.

Everyone!  We all had so much fun!