So on Saturday 17th August, there was a Korean festival that was held at New Malden. I'm pretty sure they picked that day to hold the festival because it was the first Saturday after Korean Independence Day (I could be wrong haha). Anywho.. me and some friends went down to check it out hoping to try out lots of various foods and see some cultural performances but once we got there it was surprisingly not what we expected at all. There wasn't much there to do or see involving Korea. They had a stage where they were showing acts, performances and kids demonstrating korean tae kwon do. There was only a few hot food stalls - none of them actually selling korean food apart from a Japanese stall that were selling Tteokbokki (korean spicy rice cakes).
However, we tried to make the most of our day and started off by getting ourselves some food - we went for the Japanese place. I chose a chicken bento box which was suppose to come with rice but came with noodles instead as they had run out of rice. My friend also got some dumplings to share along with some tteokbokki. The chicken bento tasted ok, pretty standard in my opinion but everything you get was pretty worth it for £5. I really liked the dumplings - it was juicy, nice tasty filling and soft yet slightly crispy on the outside. The portions of the tteokbokki were HUGEE and tasted delicious! One portion was £4 which I would say could feed 2-3 people if you were getting a main meal along with it. They were selling really fast and took awhile to wait for the next batch so my friend bought 3 boxes! Haha.. we didn't end up finishing them tho so my friend took them back home with him.
So like I said before there weren't many things there that involved Korean Culture such as the stalls around that were selling things. It seemed as though a lot of people took the opportunity for themselves to sell their own stuff. Such as freshly made pies, cupcakes, accessories and other bits and bobs. I didn't take pictures of all the stalls but here are a few along with the stage:
It started to rain :(.. so we left early and stopped off at a place called Hyun's Bakery to
grab some buns and then at a korean supermarket. LOVED IT at the supermarket!! There was so many snacks, drinks and junk junk junk I wanted to buy but I resisted pretty well :D
Woah.. this blog actually took me awhile to fix up because the CSS kept messing up when I was sorting the photos out! Gaahh- Thanks for reading guys! With Love, Jen.
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