Sea-Parting Festival

It’s amazing what Facebook can do. The Jindo Sea-Parting festival was an event on Facebook that I saw a few times as I wasted time on the app. One night, a few friends were gathered in the teachers lounge and expressed interest in going to the event. How could I turn that down? It was definitely a miserable bus ride. Four hours seated on a bus is never fun. However, upon arrival in Jindo, there were a ton of vendors offering street food along the way. The very first thing I tried was a little pastry filled with a very sweet, sticky brown stuff. It was very tasty! They cook the pastry right in front of you and give it to you piping hot! There were many vendors offering all kinds of tasty morsels. I bought a chicken wrap that was pretty good but not nearly as good as the Mexican food I am accustomed to back home. One of the coolest bits of this festival is that there was a global tents area. You could get Thai food, Vietnamese food, German food, and so on. The food is great, but we did not drive four hours on a bus just to eat and hop back on, so we ventured on past the vendors and towards the area where the actual sea-parting takes place. It was a pretty cool day so some of the group split off to get coffee. On our way to the sea-parting area we saw much more entertainment. We witnessed dogs that could jump rope and one of the dogs could even paint. There was a lot of live music and some Korean girls leading a group of people dancing the macarena. We got to buy some very fashionable orange rubber boots and were ready to sea the land bridge to make our way across. Finally, we began our trek. At some parts of this journey, the water got kind of deep but was still below the knees and below the top parts of the boots we had purchased. Suddenly, I felt a sharp tug on my backpack at one of these deep points. When I turned, I saw two elderly Korean ladies holding onto my bag for dear life and grinning from ear to ear. I just chuckled and pushed on and “mama- goosed” those old ladies to shallower water. The only bummer for the day was that we did not even get to make it across the land bridge before the tide came back in. The Korean police made us turn around and head back. Overall, it was a cool experience even without making it completely across.