Cherry Blossom Festival

We had no idea what the Cherry Blossom Festival was until one day out of no where we were, just like every other day of the week, walking to school and imagine our surprise when we saw what used to be bare trees look like this overnight. As soon as we got to work we asked about the beautiful flowers growing on the trees and that's when we found out what the Cherry Blossom Festival was.
We were told that the best place to be for the festival was in Jinhae which should have been 30 mins away but because of all the traffic it took us a little over 1 hour to get there and we were still not at the centre of the attraction. We walked for about 1 mile through a beautiful town glowing with cherry blossoms. The sad part is that these flowers only last about 2 weeks and sometimes less due to weather. They had bloomed about 1 week before we were there and already they were falling from the trees. With a little wind the pedals from the flowers fly away, my kids call it snowing cherry blossoms. We tried to catch it in action here but it's hard to see.

They also have a hiking trail in Jinhae that is lined with these trees and you can see where the trail goes in the mountain as you see a white cherry blossom line along the mountain. Read more about cherry blossoms here.

Festivities - Cherry Blossom Festival Cont'd

Here are a few more pictures and stories about the Cherry Blossom festival. They shut down several roads around the city's roundabout, which is where the stage was located. Along several streets there were a lot of tents and vendors selling everything from souvenirs to food.
They had more than 1 stage with random singing and little shows throughout the day. However, we were not really impressed with most of these preformances as it seemed more like karaoke.
They had a few advertising stands which would promote a few products or a company and sometimes they would offer samples. For advertising a new store opening or a big sale they often place 2 girls on a 8 foot stage dressed in similar attire (as you see here) and they talk and dance a little to some music playing on big speakers. We also had the pleasure of seeing this same kind of advertising at a small bakery/coffee shop by our house that sells 4 products: a roti bun, coffee, tea and 1 more item. We could hear them from our apartment for several agonizing hours. These girls are present at every new store opening.
This is a game we frequently see at festivities. You place your planks on the numbers you want, then you pick a card out of a tin can and if you covered the number that you picked, you get the prize as described on the plank, which is a kind of sugar candy of various shapes and sizes. We haven't played. Maybe one day...

Jinhae Cherry Blossom Concert

This post has been brewing in my mind for a long time now and I'm finally writing it. In early April, we went to a Cherry Blossom festival in Jinhae, South Korea. The concert part of the festival started at 8pm and finished at 10pm, which seemed very early considering the amount of work they put into the set up, as you can see in the pictures.

We saw all kinds of different groups and most of them were military performances, which really got the crowd going since they are extremely proud of their military. Every male has a mandatory time to serve in the military and when I asked my kids about it they were all really excited and looking forward to doing it, which explains the hype of these performances. They did some marching and gun twirling, which was quite impressive. However, they weren't as synchronised as I thought they would be.

We saw a few traditional performances, such as these 4 guys drumming away. Some of them also twirled big flat wheels (like plates) on sticks and did some tricks, which I'm assuming is a traditional Korean thing.

Nothing beat this Backstreet Boys knockoff group of young, skinny, Korean Sailors. Oh yeah baby! The crowd went wild! They missed a few notes on the singing, although they did pretty good since it was in English. They did however lack the choreographed dance moves. They all just did their own thing up on stage.

Maybe I should have started with this, but the stage set-up was magnificient. It had all the light effects you can think of, topped off with a disco ball. The stage was a great show in itself! We really enjoyed the evening, and everything was free-of-charge, which was also impressive.