Every year on the main road of Itaewon there’s a global village festival. Restaurants from throughout the neighborhood set up booths so you can walk down the street and try food from all over the world. There’s performances, cultural events, a parade, and an insane amount of people, more so then even usual, in Itaewon.
I stumbled upon it with my friend. Our plan had been to eat in Itaewon because we had errands to run there. I wanted to go to the bookstore and do a little bit of shopping. With the insane crowds we ended up not accomplishing most of that. But this was better than our lunch plans. We had cash, all we had to do was figure out at what we wanted to eat. We decided to walk down the street first and see what caught our eye and then circle back. We ended up not doing that because at the end was this place.
Not a restaurant but a group in Korea selling carnitas and tacos with all the proceeds going towards Mexico’s reconstruction after the recent earthquakes. Delicious food and charity? Best combo. It was so delicious we went back for seconds.
We continued walking around, I got Thai iced tea and some insanely spicy samosas before we jumped in line at Itaewon: The Burger for a milkshake.
It was insanely rich, a simple vanilla milk shake with chocolate sauce throughout, the rim dipped in either chocolate or nutella and covered in peanuts with Oreo, marshmallows, Reese’s, pretzels, Oreo cereal, and chocolate wafers made it too rich for us to each get our own and rather content to share.
We also stopped for some noodles with steak and shrimp.
After figuring out where the bookstore had moved to we headed down a side street and found tons of shops set up and a little cart with horchata which I couldn’t pass up. There were also musical performances happening at several stages.
It’s cash only so make sure you stock up, bring a hat and some sunscreen because there’s not a lot of shade. And if you don’t want tons of people coming up to you don’t just stand around on the side walk, find a spot to sit or keep walking. We stopped to enjoy our milkshake in peace and within ten minutes had three groups of people stop to interview/ ask for money/give us flyers.
The Itaewon global village festival happens every October for one weekend only. It’s definitely worth going to, made me a little homesick for Chicago and all of the festivals there.