Today was the day of the Korea Street Fair 2024 in New Delhi, organized in collaboration between the Embassy of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Youth Commerce Association, as well as my first official day as a member of The Peaceful Unification Junior Advisory Council.
The Peaceful Unification Advisory Council was in charge of one of the stalls, in which we conducted a Taegeukgi (national flag of ROK) drawing and coloring activity for those taking part in the fair. We handed out Orion Choco Pie, a popular snack by a Korean brand consisting of marshmallow fillings and chocolate covering, as a reward for their efforts after the activity along with a dog shaped balloon, which we had difficulties making (I could barely make them). A friend and I also worked on painting a Korean and an Indian flag for face painting. It turned out that painting on a face was more strenuous than simply drawing on a paper, especially the black trigrams on all four corners of the Taegeukgi, as they kept switching sizes the more, we attempted to make them look nicer. At the end, we decided to keep only the red and blue Taegeuk (represents the harmony between yin and yang) shape in the middle of the flag.
After around two hours of working in the stall, we looked around the fair for a short time, mostly to get dinner since it was getting late. I was surprised by the variety of food prepared by each food stalls. There was a number of different bunsik (relatively inexpensive Korean street food) such as tteokbokki, odeng, kimbap, and even corn dogs. I decided to get two cups of tteokbokki (rice cakes with spicy sauce and fish cake) to share with others.
While eating, we watched a show of around an hour. The show consisted of singers who incorporated K-pop with trot, a group of Indians dancing to K-pop songs, and Korean university students majoring in dance or other sports who flew in from Korea for a dance performance (one group did hip-hop and b-boying, another group did a Korean traditional dance, and the last one did a contemporary dance). It was exciting to watch them all, especially since I knew most of the songs, but also because I am an avid dancer myself. I particularly loved the hip-hop + b-boying and the contemporary dance, but all of them were enjoyable.
There were so many not only Koreans but also Indians who came to the fair, and it reminded me of the 50th anniversary of Korea-India relations last year and how it would continue to grow. I also felt an odd sense of pride in the Republic of Korea for coming such a long way from an impoverished country to one so well-known across the globe with so many people wanting to visit it. It was a day I could feel the spread of growth and spread of Korean culture to India, as well as the connection between the people despite coming from different backgrounds and countries.
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