Ginseng Festival

Last week, I took a train up to Youngju to go to the nearby small town of Punggi to go to the village's annual Ginseng Festival.  I took the tour through Adventure Korea, so there was a variety of activities set up for us.  When I arrived, we started off with a peeling the ginseng contest where whoever had the most peeled first one a prize.  We then got to walk through the festival on our own to see what the vendors had.  There was a place to see different ginseng varieties and ginseng wines.  Some vendors let you try a ginseng macoli (macoli is the rice wine popular in Korea).  There was one place where it was like a mini-spa where you could put your feet or legs in a steam.  While walking around, a few of us met the guy who is president of the ginseng foundation and he gave us a bag of organic apples, apple juice, and ginseng crackers.

After exploring the festival, we took the bus over to some ginseng fields where we were able to see how ginseng grows and harvest some of it ourselves.  Ginseng takes 4-6 years to harvest and it can only be harvested by hand because the root is the part that is used and its not easy to pull out of the ground.  The best quality ginseng should be in the ground for 6 years.

 After harvesting some ginseng and seeing the fields, we went back to the festival to make our own ginseng wine.  It was very simple.  We just peeled and cleaned a piece of ginseng, filled a bottle up with soju (rice liquor), and added the ginseng to the bottle.   We now just let the bottle sit for about 3 months.