Nonsan Strawberry Festival

One of the things I want to do a little more of this year is travelling. I have my trip home planned and my trip to Thailand for the summer is coming together. However, I'd also like to see a little more of Korea.

With this in mind I thought it might be fun to go to the Nonsan Strawberry Festival. It was this weekend and only about an hour away from Daejeon.

So the night before the festival I hadn't managed to persuade any of my friends that this was what they wanted to do with their weekend so I was looking for directions to get the train down on my own when I stumbled across a post in the Daejeon Peeps Facebook group offering a lift to the festival. I emailed them and ended up traveling with them and three others. We spent the day together, and it was really fun!

We got there and there were a lot of people there. "We arrived at maybe 12:30 and had a look around the festival. There were stalls selling everything strawberry, from strawberry salt to strawberry salsa to strawberry ddok to just plain strawberries. There were also people selling things like strawberry candles, soap, bags, necklaces and plants. There was a strawberry museum type thing, with displays of lots of strawberries. However, what I'd gone there for mostly was the strawberry picking! I loved doing it as a kid and you were allowed to eat as many as you wanted when you picked them.

At first we just wandered around the stalls. We bought some awesome jam (not the stuff that was being made there, but nicer stuff), some smoothies, some ddok and some really nice non-strawberry themed alcohol. Then it was definitely lunch time. We all had various street food type things (there were more formal sit down tents as well, but none of us needed to stop for lunch really. I had a sausage on a stick.

Next we investigated strawberry picking. We had a few misses, but then ended up at the right tent. "We paid for a ticket then when we explained that we had a car and would rather drive there, they told us it was a bus ticket and we should pay when we got there and gave us our money back. It's amazing how well you can communicate without speaking the same language. They then gave us an address for the Sat Nav (in fairness, in Korean the word for Sat Nav is Navigation).

"When we got to the farm, however, it was quite empty. There were a couple of families milling around and the owner. He explained, through a kind passerby who spoke English, that all the strawberries had been picked, but we were welcome to go in and pick any we could find for free. This was awesome! There were a fair few red ones (although I understand why he was closed) and no crowds. They were also delicious! I bought KGs of pre picked strawberries on the way out. Now I just need to decide what to do with them!

• strawberry
• Nonsan
• Korea
• travel
• festival