World Flavor

“Genuine” medieval signs at the second largest renaissance festival in the U.S.

On October 9th, Jeff and I decided to discover whether the food festival that Jeff’s co-teacher told us about existed. So we headed to Munhak Stadium which is on Incheon line 1 (as opposed to Seoul line 1…). We got there and soon saw a bunch of tents.

The first one we walked to was full of baked goods.

We noticed that it was branded as a global food fair.

The first sign of this was tortillas!

There were a lot of tents giving out free samples. I got something in a tortilla, flying fish roe, and coffee, among other things. Nearby there began tents full of food. The first one was Korean food…

…followed by a line of different country tents, with food examples and information about the country.

We then found a tent full of models of healthy school lunches. It also had a chopsticks using competition which we returned to attempt. You had to move dry beans from one bowl to another. Jeff won against an old Korean lady but I didn’t win.

Next was a tent full of food from a fancy chef contest, or something. Later on they started throwing out all the food/giving it away. I neglected to get a whole cake, or anything actually.

There was a tent showcasing alcohol of the world as well.

And of course, there were tents serving food. Sadly I have no pictures of those. There was a tent for each of the countries that were represented in the other tents. Jeff got a kebab from the Turkish tent. There were also a whole bunch of tents selling Korean food. We got some samples from them – octopus, ddeokbokki, etc. There was a pottery tent and one selling water dispensers. There was also twist potato on a stick, which I got.

Image courtesy of Jeff Bergemann.

Finally, there were some cool performances. We saw women in skimpy outfits dancing, guys in Native American garb singing, etc. Overall it was totally awesome and I’m glad we were told about it (there was ZERO info online, which is fairly typical for Korea…).