Taebeak Snow Festival...

I'm starting to try to complete my bucket list for Korea, and one of the things that was I needed to do yet was go to the Taebeak Snow Festival. Since Taebeak mountain was a trek to get to, Ben and I took an extra vacation day to have a longer weekend. We have some friends up there that we got to see and actually stay with, Mark & Elena. They are awesome and it was great to catch up with them and hear about their upcoming adventures.

On Sunday we made our way to the festival via country buses. This is always a risky thing because some buses don't run very often and you could easily get stranded for hours or even overnight. To avoid this we tried to leave extra time in our transport. In the end, we had no issues and were very lucky with the times of the buses. We hardly waited at all!

After 3 buses we made it to the festival and saw some sculptures. The festival was located going up a valley. The first sculptures we saw were not very good and had pieces of them melted or eyes falling off. Ben and I were both looking at each other like..."Is this it? Did we just travel 7 hours for this?"

There were so many kids in this area, and they were terrorizing the snow sculptures and it appeared the parents did even care!

Luckily we kept walking up the valley and we ran into another group of snow sculptures and they were much better than the previous ones. We walked up one more tier and they were AMAZING!

I'm assuming there were 3 different levels of sculptures: amateur, intermediate and professional. The professional ones were really great and they had security trying to watch out for them so they didn't get damaged.

This festival was full of humans! There were so many people there and it appeared that most of them were older. This is one of the most frustrating age groups in Korea because they just don't care a lot of the time. There were signs not to touch or step on the sculptures, and most people still climbed on them to take pictures. It was very disrespectful. Also it was a challenge to take a picture with the sculptures as well, because many of these people would jump in front of your picture because they just didn't care... 

After a time there we headed back to Mark and Elena's because they were preparing Mexican food for us and we couldn't be late for that!

On Monday, Mark and Elena drove us to an outdoor spa. It was similiar to a jjimjilbang, but this time there was a "swimsuit" area that had an indoor pool and also outdoor hot pools. Obviously there you were required to wear your swimsuit and a swim cap!

The pools outside were really cool because they overlooked the mountains. Sadly they were not covered with snow when we were there, but they still looked really cool!