Ice Festival 2.

Here are some kids sledding...













2007 is the year of the pig. Pigs are very lucky, and bring good fortune. Here are some men carving a pig out of ice!










The river was frozen solid, so thick that there were six-wheeled ATVs pulling kids around the ice. Here you can see folks on sleds, on skates, and on ice trolleys with poles to manuever themselves.












Paul, Ara, Kelsey, Helen, Kevin, and I went up into the mountains on Saturday for the ice festival. We took a bus to Inje, but it ended up that we had the wrong information and we had to take 2 more buses to get to the right town! It was pretty cold and we were bundled in layers for the day. The ice festival wasn't huge--basically a lot of families out skating and sledding with their kids! But it was fun to see everyone enjoying the cold weather, the ice, and the snow. In addition to sledding and skating, there was also ice fishing, "foot hockey", and "fish stomping". We stopped inside the warming tent for a bowl of manduguk, which is dumpling soup.