Damyeong Bamboo Forest

While we were in Gwangju our main objective was to see the sights around the city and not spend too much time in the city. I know that Gwangju as a city is probably lovely, but with our time crunch we really had to be selective!
One of the things we wanted to see was the Damyeong Bamboo Forest. I had never seen a bamboo forest and I thought it would be really interesting to see. There happened to be a bamboo festival scheduled for the weekend that we were going to be there, but again because of the ferry accident, it had been cancelled. Apparently, enough people had plans to go to this festival before the accident and weren't interested in cancelling their plans, because there were tons of people there. Our bus ride that was quoted as taking 40 minutes took 1 1/2 hours to get from Gwangju to Damyeong. The bus was just crawling with the traffic!
We were let of and not knowing really where to go we just starting walking. We noticed a huge line multiple blocks long and though- I sure hope that is not the line to get in! This is because we really only had a couple of hours before we needed to get back to catch our but to Seoul. We just kept walking, and eventually realized that we were cutting all of those people... As bad as we felt, we knew we were really only going to get to spend 30 minutes in the forest, and if we would have gone to the back of the line we would have just had to leave without seeing anything. Add the fact that I am cut in line at all times throughout the day, we didn't feel toooooo bad....
Inside the forest, the bamboo was really tall. I'm sure if you were to see it with a few less thousand people it might be really mystical, or if you saw it in the fog or mist... We wandered a bit and tested a few of the festival foods, before trying to figure out where to board the bus back to Gwangju.

We asked at least 5 people where the correct spot for the bus stop to go back to Gwangju was because we COULD NOT miss it and still make our bus to Seoul. We waited for at least 30 minutes as panic started to set it.  Finally we saw the bus coming our way slowly. As it approached, it didn't start pulling over to the sidewalk which we thought was strange.... It obviously wasn't planning on picking up the 15 people standing at the stop!

Just then- ajumma came to the rescue!!!

The bus wasn't able to move because of the traffic, so the woman ran up to the doors and started yelling and hitting the doors! The driver wouldn't open them and was yelling back at her. (It appeared he picked up from a different stop because of the traffic or somethings.) The ajumma was not going to take NO for an answer! She marched over to the police officer standing nearby, dragged him over to the bus, and made him tell the bus driver to open the doors!!! All of us piled on. It was such a funny sight to see, but we were so grateful for this woman!

We made it back to the bus terminal in enough time to get our bus out to Seoul... and we were on our way!