A Second Spring in Korea: Part I

After completely falling in love with spring in Korea last year, I was super excited about experiencing it for a second time around this year.  Overall this spring was cooler and rainier than last year, but I've still been enjoying overall comfortable weather and the lovely spring flowers.

Instead of writing in depth about everything I've been up to, I'll just give some of the highlights from the past few months.

Flowers, flowers, flowers!

I wrote about my time at the Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival, but I should also mention that once again, I got to enjoy plenty of lovely cherry blossoms all around Jeomchon.  Unfortunately, the river that is right behind my apartment is STILL under construction and we didn't have too many days with blues skies (the best background for the pink blossoms), but I still enjoyed every single day I got to walk underneath these beautiful trees, and much to my surprise they stayed in bloom longer than last year.

After the cherry blossoms fell down, it was time for the next round of flowers, the vibrant azaleas.  I love these bright flowers, and they are absolutely everywhere as you walk around town, which makes for lovely spring walks.

More recently, there have been lots of roses blooming around town.  These roses grow all over, especially along fences. These aren't the best pictures, but I'm too lazy to upload the ones I have on my actual camera...so for now you'll just have to settle for my poor cell phone ones. 

Of course, these aren't the only flowers in bloom in spring, but these are the main ones you can spot everywhere in Korea during spring.

Chasabal Festival
One of the famous festivals in Mungyeong is the Tea Bowl (Chasabal) Festival, which is held at Mungyeong Saejae.  This festival is full of local artisans, who sell their traditional ceramics.  We were lucky that this year the festival had PERFECT spring weather, so a few friends and I decided to spend the morning at Saejae.  Since they hadn't hiked the whole thing before, we went all the way to the third gate before coming back down for the festival.

Pretty waterfall at Mungyeong Saejae

The second gate of Mungyeong Saejae

Korea can make anything cute. I don't think any other country could make a tea bowl look so cute!

At the festival we even had a chance to make some of our own ceramics, something we naturally we eager to do.  

Overall, this was a really nice day right in our hometown. I will really miss Korea's festivals once I'm back home!

Weekends in Jeomchon

On occasion, we have weekends where we actually stay in town without much to do. Our routines on these weekends are somewhat predictable--dinner and drinks.  But when the weather is nice we also love to jump at the chance to have BBQs.  We typically have these on the rooftops of our apartment buildings, and it's always an enjoyable time to spend the afternoon/evening. 

My weekends this spring have also been spent doing a number of other fun things, but I'm realizing that the rest of the things all took place in Seoul.  If I write about them all in this post it will be way too long, so I'm make a separate post about my Seoul spring adventures soon (well, hopefully...)

XO