Daejeon Rock Festival (aka a lesson in inaccurate advertising)
Tuesday, October 19
I spent a while on a crowded and comparatively stuffy (compared to what you might expect in mid-October) bus talking to Amanda R. about our expectations for the Daejeon Rock Festival. It was about 5pm and the bunch of us were staring out windows or sleeping through the 45 minute trip; waiting for the outlet malls to fade away and the bus to pull into the thick of Daejeon.
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| A pretty cool ska band. Thankyou camera phone. |
The Facebook flyer advertised an incredible variety of international food and beers. The music, for a lot of us, was secondary.
"Maybe there will be fried dough," I'd say.
"Or funnel cakes," Amanda said. "Or hot dogs and sausages."
"Tacos. There will definitely be tacos."
"Cheesy stuff"
"Grilled Cheese."
"Burgers."
The list went on, or at least it did in my head. If you happen to have been on the bus that conversation might have not happened at all like that but you get the gist. Point is, I was excited about trashy, greasy, non-Korean food. Like, I was really excited. When I say that the music was secondary, at various points when I got to thinking about the food I really couldn't care less about what the music was like.
Then there was the beer.
As the bunch of us (Amanda, Katie, Christina, Tim, and I) wandered around Daejeon looking for a bus terminal some of us got to thinking about beer.
Blue Moon? Maybe even Blue Moon with an orange slice. Sam Adams Winter, I thought. Maybe they'll have the winter lager! Maybe there will be cider! This, I must say, is the prospect for which I was most excited.
I am a cider kind of guy. My fondest memories of my old apartment always involved a bunch of hard cider, Thursday night TV, a horror movie, a brisque breeze, and Mike Hadley. I would be lying if I didn't aknowledge that I was missing all of that at the current point in time. Summer is over. The pine outside my window is dying. Not so subconsciously I was going to eat everything I could, as fast as I could; and then I was going to drink as much cider as I could (also as fast as I could). I would sit in the crisp air, smell fall and get my fix and maybe stop thinking about what is going on back at home. Anyway, Proctor Street is gone and Hadley doesn't live in New England anymore and neither do I.
We never found the subway. Instead we sat in traffic and watched as fireworks cracked above the river. Beyond the bridge were "300 international food and beer" vendors all set up in a shiny white tent city that reminded me of the Head of the Charles.
Allright! Maybe I would be getting more than a little taste of New England Fall after all!
Amongst the fireworks was a flapping remote control bird with sparklers attached. That it was remote control is only an assumption as around the fireworks and amidst the smoke and sulfur flew a line of powergliders, also with sparklers attached. Above it all few a steady flow of paper lanterns, turned into balloons by the fire at it's base, that followed the wind's current like some haunted orange processional, amongst the buildings and black night.
That sight alone, looking back on that night and how it turned out, was worth the trip.
Amanda and I beat the others. We stood for a while at one of the main entrances. Straight ahead were the booms and concussions of very near fire works. The grass around us was trampled by the hundreds (probably over a thousand) people in attendance.
Foreigners. Everywhere you turned was a foreigner. All of us drawn in by the prospect of eating something other than kimchi and drinking something of better quality than Cass.
Then I saw it: directly to our right as an open stand marked Mexico next to a small image of the Mexican flag. Heaven was here. I brought with me 90,000 won. I was well aware of the potentially disasterous and definitely humiliating results of eating and drinking $90-ish worth of carnival tacos and apple cider but I was pretty much committed.
We met up with everyone and started with a 2,000 won Cass. Not a bad price when you are used to the trmendously inflated prices of events back home. Not bad at all. We then split off to find our own little slices of food and alcohol heaven.
Fault One of the Daejeon Rock Festival: Advertising.
The promise of 300 international food and drink vendors was frankly a lie. There weren't even 300 tents. There probably weren't even 300 different meals there total. Sure, there was an Indian food tent, and a couple kebab tents offering such traditional turkish kebabs as the chicken-drowned-in ketchup-and-russian-dressing-in-a-fajita kebab, and a Spanish food tent that sold stir-fried veggies and tomato sauce but that was really pretty much it.
As for the Mexican food tent; well, I'd rather not talk about it. Suffice to say there were no tacos and the sold only a tiny little fried thing of dough that was allegedly full of beef. There was no fried dough, and there were burgers or western hot dogs either for that matter. The food was a total let down.
The beer was not much different. The Daejeon Rock Festival Facebook page is currently filled with people complaining about the "international beer selection" amongst other and bigger problems. Other than the very cheap Cass (if you had the patience to stand in the giant line that sometimes formed) there WERE international beers. Sure, there was no cider to be had but there were other exotic drinks like Bud Ice. Bud f*#&@^& Ice. I shouldn't even tell anybody that Bud Ice is actually available in a lot of bars here but the fact that it cost what you would expect an "imported" beer at a music festival cost probably made a lot of people laugh.
There were other beers: Hoegarden, San Miguel and such but all of which can be bought at any convenience store by any of our apartments.
Still, the thing was free and it was something to do. You get what you pay for and in this instance, crappy food and drink aside, we were getting more than we paid for. This festival was one of the few places I have been, other than the bars at Itaewon, that had such a high ratio of westerners to natives. It wasn't really necessary to speak Korean. It is nice to know what is going sometimes. That is a rare feeling.
The bands went on. Rick and Lauren turned up for a while and we walked around looking for food. Now, before I came to Korea I worked as a photographer for a magazine. The first event I shot for them was a beerfest in southern Massachusetts. I had two tickets and invited Ricky along. I showed up first. According to the organizers we would be given 5 tickets (everyone who paid the $20 admission and media) for free beer samples and 5 tickets for free food samples. By the time I got there and finished shooting I realized too late that the free food had run out. By the time Rick got there the only thing we could redeem our tickets for was a horrible, lukewarm hot dog. The place was basically on its way to chaos. There were many awesome beers and ciders there but I had mainly dragged Rick at the promise of awesome BBQ food at the expense of the magazine.
Beer stalls eventually started taking food tickets as well as drink tickets. It was hot as hell and there was no free water. People were baking, hungry, and soon enough the vendors were just giving people free drinks. It was one of those situations where I made my way to my car to get the crap out of there before a couple hundred drunks put Douglas, MA on the map for the worlds biggest DUI case.
Daejeon Rock Festival was pretty much the same thing. Granted Rick and Lauren live in Daejeon and didn't come as far as most people there and they came on their own free will, but still. Rick tried to get a hot dog and wound up with some fried seafood jammed onto some chopsticks.
I tried boiled Bundigie (silkworm larvae) and discovered that they are pretty much what you would imagine. They have this sickly-sweet sort of smell that fills your lungs like it is as thick as steam. They taste a little bit like sweat and as with most weird foods it's that you are conciously aware that you just paid money to buy and eat bugs that really grosses you out. That pop when you bite into them and the spray of hot briney bug insides sort of contributes to grossness factor too.
So, the festival was fun. They never actually said there would be tacos. It was a nice night. I was there with my friends from home and from here in this strange little life we had. Our plan was to stay until the finale at 4am and then hop a bus back to Cheongju at 6am.
Fault Two of the Daejeon Rock Festival: We don't need no stinkin' permit!
This was the first time anything like this has been done in central Korea. It was the idea of a westerner and it was endorsed by the city council as a good way to get more people to make their way to our neck of the woods. As it is, there isn't a heck of a lot of tourist business done anywhere but Seoul or Busan.
It seems the what ended up happening is the fault almost entirely on the entertainment company that set up the festival in the first place. Nobody really knew what to expect as far as crowd turn out but the festival was given the greenlight to go on til 4am according to the entertainment company who also dealt with the logistics. This, again, isn't really fact. I am paraphrasing the people on the Daejeon Rock Festival's page who have come to the defense of it's creator.
Crowd turnout was pretty amazing. People came from all around Korea. Basically everyone I have met in Korea was there. Cheongju was probably a pretty empty place that night.
It is because of this impressive crowd that it was such a disaster when the cops shut down the entire festival at 12am.
The streets near the festaval grounds suddenly took on the feel of a muted Cloverfield. Dozens of foreigners left the same way as us and we wandered down the road for a while trying to hail cabs at 12:30am. The occasional cab that passed as we sat or stood in the road with arms flailing sped right by. It was probably the same mindset as in Titanic lifeboats that wanted to avoid being swarmed by the desperate, but in this case it was the thought of 10 drunk foreigners turned out to the streets that led to the "screw this crap" attitude of the cabs.
Our group split off, crossed a bridge and walked through the longest park ever. At the end we tried for a long time with no success for a taxi. We eventually put up our thumbs and hailed a random minivan that told us he could only take two people. Obviously, it seemed like a good idea that the girls all go with him. Christina and Katie hopped in followed by Amanda who sprinted across the roads and just got in the passengers door. They were off and eventually those that remained piled into a cab and headed downtown.
The girls survived. That's probably important. The night became a blur of people. Yellow Taxi (or Cab, I don't know) basically had the entire festival inside and was packed. Some of us ended up at Garten Bier until 3am, at which point we summoned the troops and cabbed it all the way back to Cheongju.
Dissapointments aside, Daejeon Rock Festival was actually pretty fun. At the least it will make a good story. Also, I didn't shit my pants from eating 45 tacos so I have that going for me.
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