Getting there

The biggest part about this, I thought that getting to the butterfly festival was a trip, this was an adventure. We took the bullet train up to a small town, took a bus from that town to Gochang, then took another bus to get to the festival itself. Luckily, that last bus was a free shuttle for the festival! 😁

A coke themed cafe outside the trian station we landed at. I wanted to stop here to get something for my dad but time didn't allow that 😓

Being that it was noon at that point we needed some food. My friend is vegetarian, so we settled for kimbab (김밥) and kimchi dumplings (김치 만두). Then we were off to the festivalwith full bellys!

Gochang Green Barley Field Festival (고창 청보리밭축제)

!steemitworldmap 35.375451 lat 126.542957 long Gochang Green Barley Field Festival d3scr

On top of the bus being basically free and straight to the festival, there was not an entrance fee. Bonus! So we just walked straight trough and could buy as much food as we wanted!

The front gate to a private residence, with some guard dogs.

Close up of these barley plants 😀

Raspberry Barley ice cream!

Canola flowers, learned that they also have a canola festival other years. So it is crop rotation, barley needs high amounts of nitrogen to grow, while canola needs a fraction of that. It is the same in my home, swapping corn for soybeans. If you don't do this then the soil goes to crap like in the 1930s.

Some kind of traditional style home for farmers.

I'll be honest, I don't understand this 😂

A Little Photo Shoot 😂

This was mostly a subtle jab at the Koreans having their own photo shoots, I won't quit my day job. Lol

I also suck at taking selfies, this wasn't so bad though. The red mark is from my sunglasses losing a rest 😐

Koi Pond

Came down here for the food but it was basic festival food (potato sticks, corn dogs, chicken and the such) but we did find this pond.

Never seen baby koi fish like this 🤗

Again, no idea. A shot in the dark guess is that it is talking about how koi fish were kept to rotate the soil and keep nutrients in it resulting in the various colors and patterns that koi fish have today and the importance they hold in agriculture. Again just my guess.

Back to the Barley!

These ribbons are meant to remember people that passed too soon. For what incident, I do not know.

You could also pay to ride a horse carriages but that wasn't necessary for us. Still cool though 😊

Food!!

Resisting the fried foods paid off because we found a little restaurant selling barley based food and products. We got some barley tea for home and ordered a barley Korean style pancake (보리파전) 😋

Buckwheat Tea for home

This was amazing and worth it!

Barley beer! It taste how you would assume a barley beer to taste like, just a normal beer 😏 anything to day drink 😂

My friend also got some sweet barley bread and cookies for her host family. I don't have a family though and been limiting my carbs/sugar so I didn't have an interest for it.

Windmill

There was this windmill that would have been used to grind the grains back in the day. They had classical music playing out of it and made for a great point to take some shoots before we left 😁

Being the only white person I saw at the festival, when I try to take photos people are looking right at me. So I had cover a couple faces 😑

It is just like on the website 😆

Getting Home

Getting here was one thing, getting home was.....something else. We got the free shuttle no problem but then waiting for a bus would have been a three hour ordeal. We opted to catch a bullet train at a nearby station. This is where the problems began.

We took a taxi to get to the station which the taxi driver kept asking us if he wanted us to just go to Gwanju using his taxi. That would have costed more than double 😑 we get to the train station and he tells us the he doesn't take cards 😑 Which I see that he has a card reader there but he refuses to take it!

So we have to go to a bank because I have never encountered this, the atm wasn't accepting my friend's card. Then it wasn't accepting mine. So I kicked the damn atm and it began working. Paid the taxi driver (an extra 3 dollars because of the ride to the bank 😡) get in and we missed our train. All the while the taxi is still sitting outside because we told him when our train was to take off. Lieing bastard wanted to get paid double.... so he made us miss our train hoping we would take the taxi 😠

We waited an hour and a half for the next train. By that point it was too late to meet my friend to drink since we got to Gwangju around 9:30 and buses home end at 11. Had a great day, aside from that taxi driver.

I tend to write about life in Korea as a foreigner, food, photos from trips, and things teaching related. If that interest you and you like this post, please give me a vote and follow 👍
Fellow minnows can use Busy and Steemfollower to get more upvotes and followers, my referral links are below respectively:
https://busy.org/i/@mr-bike
https://steemfollower.com/?r=14715
Until then,
Ride on!