When Hell Freezes Over

That is when I will go back. Let this be a warning to any newbies in Korea, and a reminder to all old hands: the Korean word 축제 is a bad, bad word. For those of you who don’t know Korean, it means: a writhing mass of cattle herded in and out of ridiculous places in and attempt to deprive them of any dignity left to their name, including money.

Well, the direct translation is something more like a festival, but don’t assume it is actually anything of the sort. The last festival I went to was the 안면도 국제 꼿 박람회 (박람회 is also interchangeable in this use for 축제). That was five years ago. I forgot how horrible that was and made the mistake of going to the 함평 국제 나비 엑스포. So a country town tries to survive economically by holding a festival on butterflies. That doesn’t sound too exciting, right? But maybe they will have some interesting displays of butterflies, or maybe you can actually see some live ones. Well, I got tricked into going (or coerced). We arrived to these massive parking lots. That should have sent off warning alarms in my head. Then we got up to the gate and I saw that they were bending you over and cleaning out the old tailpipe for 7,000원. I would expect a bunch of bumpkins trying to make a buck on butterflies to charge about 4,000원, but fine, I guess 7,000원 was not too horrible. I then go to pay and she says 45,000원 for the three of us. 15,000 a person? For some butterflies? I had looked at the wrong table, the one for the elderly, disabled, and otherwise financially challenged like soldiers. Wow!

That is all I can say. You can get 자유 이용권’s into Everland, Lotte World, the 민속촌, Seoul Land, for that much if you get the right credit card to pay. I personally find large roller coasters more fun than butterflies. Anyway, I was already at the point of no return. I should have just sent my family in and gone back to the car at that point, because there was no way this was going to end up good for anyone. We bent over to take the abuse and then headed in. We went to eat. Again, this was terrible, cafeteria food, and again, as you can see from the pictures, these bumpkins really know how to take you to town. You can see they didn’t quite have the balls to express their ridiculous prices in 원. So they use the cute expression of 냥.

This has two meanings. It either means: “We are cute and want to use the traditional unit of money, and our product is cheap enough that it makes sense as 1,000냥. In this case, they are using a much bigger number. You can see 20,000냥. That is the other definition of 냥. It means “we expect you to really take this up the tailpipe, and to soften the impact, we are trying to be cute and say 냥. It was not cute. The food was horrible too. Then we went to see the butterflies. That was literally us being herded through these cattle gates. I kid you not, it was just like those holding pens they herd cattle through. Then you walk into this room full of the worst displays of butterflies I have ever seen. Apparently God didn’t do a good enough job, so Koreans had to take his work and make it better. You can see the beautiful blue balls of butterflies, the circles of different colors, and all the other pretty designs.

It was also stunning to see how much the Koreans admired this.

You can see the herds of people going by and looking. I really have a hard time believing these bumpkins can get away with doing this to people year after year. We then went out to see the live butterflies. It turns out they are a bunch of those white moths that are so common (the ones that stem from the green caterpillars). Then they had a couple of different varieties in big glass containers so you couldn’t actually touch them. You know, I can go out into any park and see those moths. I didn’t need to take out a second mortgage to attend the festival and see them there. They even add to the joy by selling butterfly wings, hats, shirts, pants, and shoes to your kids. Then they sell those little green moth caterpillars to you in a little plastic cage. The profit margin on those is like 99%, because it is the cost of the cage. Well, I hope I have given you a good enough idea of what a farce these places are. I will never, ever, ever, go back, and neither should you. The one last comment I will end this rant with is that 국제 is a very fee term here. It means: “we have absolutely no foreigners here and are a very xenophobic, homogenous set of mongrels from Mongolia. Thus we say we are international.” I guess technically I was there, so it was international, but still…

P.S.: Of course, my wife was all upset with me for complaining the whole time. I knew that this would never turn out well. I guess I just may not understand this aspect of Korean culture (desire to mass in herds and enjoy it)