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| south korea |
| yangyang salmon festival |
| The Yangyang Salmon Festival takes place annually in October in the Namdaecheon River in downtown Yangyang city. It's a popular event and a good idea to book tickets well in advance. Christa, Raswon, Soutthida, Melvin, Naegyong and Dustin all participated. Basically for 20,000 won (about $20 Canadian) you can run into a closed off section of the river and grab a swimming salmon with your barehands. This salmon is yours, you can release it, give it away, play with it, put it under your friend's mattress or eat it....whatever you want. I managed to arrive just minutes before we all ran into the river....it was madness!!! |
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| Right before go time... |
| Salmon in the river, ripe for the picking. |
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| Raswon and I reenacting our catch (with our now dead fish) for the news cameras. |
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| Christa and her fish. |
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| Christa's fish started freaking out and laying eggs. |
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| Of course, what else would you expect when you put Ras and Melvin together. |
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| You could have your salmon printed, we didn't because there was a huge line up and because it was Korea, everyone kept pushing ahead of us. |
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| Afterwards, for a few more won you could have your fish "professionally" gutted. |
| They pulled the roe out and kept it separate. Some people like to eat this stuff raw or use it for fish bait. |
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| We sat down for a nice salmon meal with some dongdongju to wash it all down and then took home the ones we caught. |
| The next day, Christa and I met this dog in Yangyang. We fed him some nasty shrimp sausage, but he loved it and I named him "Tyler." Poor little Tyler, running around craving shrimp sausage all by himself now. |
| We all had an awesome time at the festival. There were several photographers snapping photos of all of us (beause we were the only foreigners there). The next day there were pictures of all of us in three different national Korean newspapers and even a feature on TV. My students couldn't stop talking about how they saw "teacher" on TV. |
| Christa and I took our fish home, cut mine up and had a nice salmon dinner with all kinds of vegetables and sauces. |