Junam Wetlands

This weekend Nolan and I decided to check out the Junam Resevoir site in Changwon. After attending the KBS Ramsar concert that highlighted the importance of preserving natural wetlands, I thought our mini excursion was quite fitting. The Junam resevoir is the largest bird migration site in South Korea.
Do you see the little black specs in the picture, right above the mountains? Yupp, those are all birds. It was hard to capture in photos. But the flock of birds were all flying in all sorts of directions and making crazy formations. It's really something else to watch in person.

We ended up going during some bird watching festival. I wish I was more of a bird enthusiast. I don't think I appreciated the whole magnitude of it all, because I didn't know which birds were which and which ones were extremely rare. The awe-ness of it all lied with the natural scenery and the amount of birds that were present at the site.
Here's nice view of the area as the sun's reflection hits the water.
More of the wetlands.
They had stations set up along the long pathway where kids and their parents could do crafty activities. I was also in the process of finding a present that I could send back home. I spotted this fan station where the ladies were painting names onto the paper fans.

A little down the road they had this other tent where people were pounding away at rice cake. Nolan got a chance to take a swing at the rice cakes. Here's a short clip of him using all his might as he takes his best shots.
After all the pounding was done with they put the wad of rice cake onto a pan and sprinkled the brown powdery stuff onto it. After sifting it for a bit they cut it all up and handed us a cup with a few pieces of the freshly made rice cakes. I took a bite of it. It was like biting into sweet dry sand with glutinous chewy rice cake inside.
We stepped into a gift shop for a few moments. It had a large map of the area along with a few pictures of the park. This picture features a handful of Korean bird watchers, along with one lone tall foreigner looking inredibly creepy right smack dab in the middle!

We also got to see a selection of crittery creatures.
That's a really big yellow snake, in case you couldn't tell.
This guy was fun to watch.
This picture really has nothing to do with the Junam resevoir. But as we were headed in that direction we noticed how colorful the mountain has become. Fall really shows itself in Korea and all the leaves have begun to show their true colors.