Green Tea Festival in Hadong

In the summer of '08 we went to the Green Tea Festival in Hadong. We took the train to a nearby city and from there we had to take a bus through the mountains and the smallest towns imaginable with really old hut looking buildings. I remember asking Ben several times, "are you sure we are on the right bus?"


Hadong was not much bigger than the towns we saw on the way but it did have a few modern buildings built for tourism and a small tourist strip with restaurants and souvenir shops. Once we got there we went to the information booth and saw that they had a few English translators walking around. We also got these awsome paper ajumma hats that didn't last long and some free green tea.



The festival had a lot of great things to see and do such as making green tea soap, a traditional banner, candals, other arts and crafts, face painting, getting your name written in Korean on a fan and much more. There was also a stage where various artists played music and they had presentations but they were in Korean.



The best activity is visiting all the tea-makers' booths. You can sit with the pros and talk with them. We managed to find a booth with an English speaking lady who spent several years in Vancouver and she told us all about tea. There are a few variations to the tea we were tasting and I only remember the green tea, yellow tea and black tea. Each tea is made the same by pouring warm to hot water through the tea leaves and that's it. You don't let the leaves sit in the water like we do with regular tea back home. They use ceramic 2-3 ounce cups and they sometimes have a ceramic lid to keep the warmth in.




In the museum we got to read all about how green tea was brought to South Korea by a king in the good old days and how tea became well known and important in South Korea. We got to read about the 5 effects of tea and my favorite was #5 Eliminates a hangover. We got to sniff the multitude of tea variances that is grown in South Korea which is what you see here in these gars on posts.



At one point during the day we spotted our translator running around franticly looking for all foreigners. She grabbed us and told us to follow her. We ran to a gathering where a contest was about to start. We were all brought into a quarantined area of green tea bushes and were told to look for small bags that would contain prizes and one golden bag which contained the big prize. I pushed my way through kids and old ladies and searched like I never did before but I didn't find anything.