Jisan Valley Rock Music Festival

Korean School children get about a month off from school in the summer. In America, summer vacation is a joyous time of playing outside, going to the beach, going to camp, taking a family trip, and best of all: NO HOMEWORK!!! Korea is a little bit different. Not going to school does mean more time for all of the things I mentioned as it seems like many of my students go on trips and visit the beach during the summer. However, it also means they have more time to go to their academies so all of the schools have "intensive periods" where the students come in earlier and stay longer. As I am a teacher at such a school I have increased hours and classes. Instead of starting work at 2pm and working until 9pm, I now work from 9am-7pm and have an 80 minute lunch break.

Actually teaching 8 hours a day is pretty tiring, but overall my classes are better behaved than last term. The kids are now here for almost 4 hours as opposed to almost 3 hours and they seem pretty burnt out when it is time to teach the extra class. Anyway, the intensive period isn't fun, but I will get some overtime pay. It is also unfortunate that right when this new schedule started the weather got really hot and sunny, but we spend most of the sunlight hours at work, so trips to the beach happen after sundown or only on weekends.
(Making that more tolerable is the fact that the beach is incredibly crowded during the day and doesn't seem like it would be that great a time. I was at the beach at 3:30am last Friday and was amazed that it was still crowded. Not like it is during the day, but there wasn't enough space to throw a frisbee unless we went way down to one of the ends.) See attached photo of busy Haeundae Beach:

It worked out that halfway through the second week of the new schedule my school took a vacation and we got 3 days off! These days off corresponded to a music festival that takes place each summer outside of Seoul at a ski resort. It is a pretty big festival--maybe 30,000 attendees on the busy days--where both domestic and international bands play. This year, some of the bigger acts were: Muse, Belle and Sebastian, Pet Shop Boys, and Vampire Weekend. Last year, Oasis and Weezer played. Five of the other foreign English teachers I work with at my school decided to get camping passes and have 3 days of music and fun.

About a week before we were going to leave, we decided it might be a good idea to rent a car/van and drive up. The bus shuttle from Busan to the festival sold out and we were told that it would be possible to buy them in person at the time, but we would be unable to actually reserve them. We called around to some rental places and with the 6 of us, it ended up being about $70 each + gas, which was slightly more than the shuttle, but likely cheaper than taking KTX Train and buses to the venue, if the shuttle was unavailable. We were also able to bring more supplies like a cooler, chairs, food, etc.

The festival didn't officially start until Friday, but camping was open Thursday night and since none of us had to work we decided that it would be nice to get there early and relax. I had no interest in driving, but some people were eager to get back behind the wheel, so people took turns driving. Luckily, the ride was mostly uneventful.

There is a little bit of a difference in driving in Korea compared with America ( in addition to the crazy Korean drivers) because the police don't really pull over people for speeding on the freeway. Instead, they have these traffic cameras that road signs warn you of several kilometers prior to passing them. They are about every 10-15 kilometers, but I don't think there is much speed reducing enforcement in between them. We also had a GPS gizmo that would beep about a kilometer before we reached the cameras so I don't think we ended up getting any tickets. Maybe in a couple weeks we will get thousands of dollars of tickets, but I don't think so.

We got to the festival grounds before they had even opened the gates and had to wait around for a little while before we got our tickets. We trudged about a kilometer or so with all of our gear including a cooler full of liquids that was quite heavy. We rented 3 tents for the 6 of us for $30 each for all three nights. After putting up the tents we relaxed, drank some beer, and blew some bubbles. We spend about $50 on bubble makers which was a great investment! Shockingly, it did not rain the whole time we were there. I think it would have been welcome, however, because the temperature was well above 30 degrees C and even got up to about 38 at times. Needless to say, I was pretty much drenched in sweat the whole time. I think I had to drink about a gallon of water every day. It was a fun trip. I'll try to put up some photos when I acquire some. For now you can check out this "where's Jamie" on the website.


The link is to the festival site and has a bunch of pictures. If you are interested in seeing what the scene was like there just click on the numbers at the top to go to different pages and clicking the Korean letters will bring up a different album. I can try to post a couple here when I get them from my friends.

I'll try to post again soon!