Food, flowers, booze, mountains, rivers, music, nature – it seems to me that every weekend Busan hosts a different festival to celebrate…well pretty much anything you can think of. We’ve experienced quite a few since moving to Korea and this blog will give you some idea as to what they were all about.
First up we have the Suyeong Flower Festival. This was a very simple festival held in a small park by the river Suyeong. There wasn’t much going on in the way of entertainment while we were there but we did get some lovely photos of the arrangements that had been created in the grounds so here are my favourites:
A couple of weeks later we attended a Makeolli Festival. For those of you who don’t know, Makeolli (with a variety of different Romanised spellings) is a traditional Korean drink made from rice. It’s usually around 8% and has a pleasant, but quite yeasty taste. It also comes in many flavours, of which mango is obviously the best. Anyway, it took quite a while to get to the festival site and I have to say it wasn’t that great – hardly any free samples and again, not much going on. However, we did eat some scrummy pajeon (a Korean spring onion pancake which I have learnt to make) and had a rather bizarre experience involving some traditional dancers and drummers. We had only been on the festival site for about 2 minutes when we were surrounded by about 15 people playing very loud instruments, wearing strange costumes and dancing round the two of us while 150 Koreans pointed and laughed at us silly foreigners.
We danced with them while they circled around us and the whole thing went on for over 4 minutes before they let us go! I know it was this long because Dave made a video of most of it, which we will upload in a later blog.
After we got bored of the festival we moved on to a different part of the city, famous for housing a big university and thus lots of places to drink and party. There was a connected event going on here – a makeolli street party. We were given lots of free cups of makeolli, served out of a petrol canister, and we danced the night away under the stars to live music including, amazingly, some drum’n’bass!
The final festival in this post is perhaps best explained with pictures so I will keep the words to a minimum. It was the Haeundae Sand Festival – a festival of sand, held on Haeundae beach. Nuff said.
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Great start - no sand in sight but clearly
I had to include this epic robo-pic! |
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There was loads of sand art moulded onto the sides of
big humps of...sand. It was pretty sandy. |
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| Some was kind of odd... |
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| ...some didn't make much sense... |
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| ...Gulliver was there... |
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| ...and so were the ghostbusters! |
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This is my best impression of a mermaid.
You can't see in the picture but I have fins and a tail, honest! |
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| Awesome dragon and Asian man dude. |
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| Antz? |
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| There was a Fairytale theme going on... |
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| ...hence Tom Thumb. |
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| There were a couple of big ones that had been painted. |
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Sadly these guys got a bit lost since the Yellow Brick Road
kind of blended into the sand. |
We have loads more pictures but I had to be discerning and just choose my faves. Anyway, it was dead good!
I'm sure one day we will catch up with the blogs but we're off to China in a couple of days and have had quite a few adventures the last couple of weeks with my family so it'll be a while until we're up to date, sorry!
