A visit to the Hampyeong Butterfly Festival.

Here's a map of the festival grounds, from the festival website. Quite large, as you can see. Actually, the festival website still has information about the 2008 Expo, but I suppose that's close enough 2893u4q8ru39rfoajlsd.

This weekend was a big one for festivals, and I managed to get to four of them. Because I hate Korea so much, I ended up taking around 700 pictures, and will try to find time to get them up this week. The first one I visited was the Butterfly Festival in Hampyeong county. It runs through next weekend, so if you're in the area and looking for something to do, there's that. The festival site is huge, there are a lot of pretty flowers, and is relatively popular: this article says that about 110,000 people attended on May 2nd and 3rd. We didn't bother looking at the butterflies this year, and didn't look in many of the indoor exhibitions. I recall from last year that they were all pretty lame, and so I didn't want to waste any time standing in line to look at corn. As for the butterflies, I suppose I'm a little hard to please because there is a more impressive variety of animals and insects at my parents' house in Pittsburgh, and I would meet about as many butterflies on my way to the mailbox as I did last year at the World Butterfly and Insect Expo. Like I said, go if you'd like to take a stroll in a very big park; it's only thirty minutes from Gwangju.

It rained pretty good on Saturday and the weather was bad Sunday morning, so we didn't actually leave the house until about 1:00. My girlfriend had class on Monday, so we didn't stay long enough to see everything. Here are a few pictures I took with my new point-and-shoot; there are many more in my flickr gallery. First up is porn, a mainstay at festival dollar stores.



You would be surprised how many hits I get for "hospital porn" each day, and I will guess I am now your one-stop shop for "Hampyeong porn" on the internet. From the bus terminal to the festival site is a long market area rows of tents covering restaurants, games, clothes, souvineers, and various knick-knacks. Here's some food.



It was a beautiful day when we finally got there.




Clouds came and went, and I'll blame the overall poor quality of my pictures on them. Actually, I was playing with a new Casio point-and-shoot for the first time, and I didn't realize the photographs looked so bad until I got them home. It looks like I had the flash on for most of them, which gave them a yellowish tint. In fairness, though, you hardly ever accurately capture a festival on camera, so I'll just leave it at that.



There were statues of famous Korean entertainers. Here is Bae Yong-joon and Choi Ji-woo from the soap opera Winter Sonata ridiculous ridiculously popular among Japanese.



And here's BoA.



Here's the Obama cut-out that Hampyeong debuted in November. I suppose the "Yes we can" in Hampyeong's case refers to the county's efforts to become a leading eco-tourism destination.



I stood still for a couple seconds for the picture, and when I moved I startled a woman who assumed I was cardboard as well. "No," I said, "that's just my personality."

A few pictures of the scenery.









There was a field of painted cows.






And a large rope snake.



Here people could choose items for a hypothetical meal, and the cashier would scan the barcodes to tell them the nutritional information.



More scenery.



There's a hill behind the festival grounds, with a cute little exercise area halfway up. Don't bother waiting in line at the library upstairs unless you have small children.







Here's a view of half the festival grounds. There's a small amusement park and a pond with duckie boats int he background.



Because we had to leave early we skipped many of the exhibits, although we did look through the bat exhibit that had no bats. We also, unfortunately, hurried through the left side of the map up top.





Here children were catching mudfish (추어, in Korean), at what was probably the least favorite part of the festival for mothers.



As you can see from the splashes in the water, a man periodically threw more in.



The day's haul.



Some of the star performers.



Again, it's worth a trip if you live nearby and would like to stroll around outside for a little while. Don't expect too much on the butterfly front, though, and expect to be a little disappointed if you grew up around nature. I wonder if it's too early in the season to have butterflies outside, or if the climate has more to do with it. But for people who have spent most of their lives in cities and far from nature, I suppose the festival is more appealing. And since we're being cranky, if you're trying to promote your county as a world-reknowned eco-tourism destination, and if you're trying to push your festival as one of the best in the nation, it would be a good idea to have a foreign-language version of the website and to offer information current to this year.

It only takes about thirty minutes from Gwangju, and buses leave about once an hour. On the way back, though, there's a good chance you'll have to take one of the Hampyeong local buses that run frequently to Gwangju; they'll take about an hour to get back.