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[Ya-ta Boy]

If you have been waiting with baited breath for this year's Dropwort Festival in Go-ahm, you can relax. It was the 2nd annual festival and it had a grand total of 7 people.

Along about 2:02 Jin-Woo said he and Young-Duck (unfortunately his mom married a Kim and not a Kwak) were going to the Dropwort Festival and asked,"Do you have time"? As my last class of the day had been cancelled and the office was full of cops getting ready for their 'Avoiding Violence' lecture, and I had nothing pressing on my schedule, I agreed. "What time?" I asked. The answer was 4:30. (I should have known that that was wrong. Jin-Woo, who has written and published two travel books and a Korean writing book has trouble with 4 and 5, not an unusual thing.)

I diddled until 4:30 at which time the women teachers took out the tang-soo-yook and beer and started partying (it is Wednesday!) and there were no men in sight. So I raided the refrigerator and managed to refrain from the partial bottle of Lancelot whiskey and went for the full bottle of soju. Half a bottle later, the men showed up from the volleyball game and a good time was had by all.

Along about 6 Jin-Woo said, "Five minutes". So fifteen minutes or so later Young-Duck climbed in the back seat and I got in the front with Jin-Woo. Off we went into the wilds of Changnyoung County. (City slickers will note that we are about 45 minutes south of Daegu.) It should have been a 20-30 minute drive, but of course Young-Duck was born in Go-Ahm, so he knew a short cut. Once the narrow two-lane highway turned into a one-lane track, I knew we were on the wrong road. Twenty minutes later so did the other two guys. We managed to turn around.

Back to the main road, and on to Go-Ahm. The festival turned out to be 4 plastic tents set on cement floors on the side of a mountain, above a bunch of plastic green houses. We went in the best one (it was higher on the mountain side) than the other three. The 'master' was off in a green house.

So we went back down the mountain to one of the plastic tents on the main road. We go in. Lo and behold, Young-Duck knew the owner of the plastic tent. They went to middle school together. (Something tells me there are no branches on the family trees around here.) We got the usual fatty sahm-gyap-sahl ( ) and a bushel of dropwort. What is dropwort, I hear people asking. Good question. According to the dictionary, it is Japanese parsley. I was at a freakin' parsley festival with no other people besides the two I came with and the owners of the plastic tent. No crowds. No fireworks. No games. No crap to buy. No nothing...but stars in the sky and fresh air and peace and quiet. Not all that bad for an evening....but not exactly a festival.

KBS was by yesterday to tape them so it should be on the tube soon. Maybe it will get famous and I will enter the history books as the first waygookin to attend the Dropwort Festival and have a statue at the head of the valley. (Well, why not?)

And what are we celebrating? It seems there are two kinds of dropwort (Japanese parsley)...you can harvest it in three seasons--spring, summer and fall, or, like this little valley, you can harvest it only in the spring.

And how do you eat this stuff? Well, it comes in a foot-long stem with 6 or 7 leaves at the top...not the curly kind of parsley that you buy in every grocery store in the country, but the flat kind. The ajumma shows you how to bend two stalks of this stuff and lay a piece of fatty fatty sahm-gyap-sahl on top of the bend, pick up a dab of sahmjang and put it on the meat and eat away. Of course you are left with 4 stalks of the leaves, which you stuff in your mouth. Near the end of the meal, you get some side dishes.

Also, you get the meat-delivery man, his wife, an elderly man (the delivery man's dad and his wife?). That makes 7 people for a festival.

I'm making light of it, but I really did enjoy my evening. This kind of odd thing is what I came to Korea for. Getting taken away into the back country of the 'real' Korea. Meeting the middle school class mate of my friend who he hasn't seen in 45 years, and his wife, have a shot of soju with the meat delivery man's dad....and looking up at the stars above a beautiful valley.

There's a thread where someone is asking if all the horror stories are from small towns. No doubt there are some, but we all know the majority come from the cities. I know I came to Korea to meet some Koreans and have a little adventure. Sitting at the beer hoff and *itching with the other foreigners about how awful life is here in Korea is not all that appealing or different from life at home. I came for the little things here.

You may not agree, but I think my coolness factor went up a few degrees because I attended the Second Annual Go-Ahm Dropwort Festival...and no one else did.