Buddha’s Birthday Parade

May 16th there was a big parade to celebrate Buddha’s birthday.  Fortunately for us it started right by our apartment at Gudeok Stadium and we just kind of stumbled on it.  The parade went from our neighborhood to Busan station.  We watched part of the parade from a little baseball bar that overlooks the street where the parade was so that’s why some of the pictures are from above.

This is part of the ceremony that they had in Gudeok Stadium which is where the parade started. We watched for a while but then decided that since we were hungry we'd go get some food before the parade started.

Yay the parade finally started. This is one of the buddha floats.

A lotus flower float (this was one of my favorites)

This is us about to get pushed out of the way by the parade. This Korean man in the audience kept taking Patrick's camera and offering very kindly to take our picture. The only problem was that everytime he did it it was like the first time he ever held a camera and it would take him a good two minutes or so to figure out how to take a picture. By which time the float or whatever would already have passed us.

Unfortunately this pictured turned out a bit fuzzy but this lady just perfectly shows the mood of the parade. Everybody seemed so happy to be a part of it.

We weren't really sure what this motorcycle riding, fire shooting pig had to do with the rest of the parade but it definitely won the prize for funniest float.

Lots of ladies with lanterns...

... and finally some more lanterns.

Our New Home

This was the state my bag was in by the time it got to Busan. I guess it goes to show that you get what you paid for and I paid exactly $20 for this bag. At least I didn't lose anything out of it.

Our apartment as seen from standing in the front entrance...

... and now standing in the kitchen...

... and the kitchen itself. The apartment isn't huge but it's a good size for the two of us and it's starting to feel like home.

This is me eating a giant bowl of kimchi jiggae at the bar down the street from our house. We're pretty sure that the lady running the bar assumed we couldn't handle the spiciness and watered it down for us because she warned us that it was spicy and then it was totally not spicy at all.

This is Gudeok stadium which is right near our house. The weekend before last it was all full of people getting ready for the Buddha's birthday parade. But we thought that it was a festival and that there would be a show so we went in and sat down. It took us about an hour or so to realize that we were watching the dress rehearsals/organizations, at which point we gave up and went to the beach.

The lighthouse and breaker near Songdo Beach. It only takes about 15 minutes on the city bus to get to this beach so we'll be spending plenty of time there once the weather decides to warm up.

Patrick with the beach in the background. I was having some camera issues this day so I didn't get a really good shot of the beach itself. But it's pretty nice.

Now me in front of the beach. Notice the fake whale in the background. There's also a big ring with fake dolphins jumping through it.

These people seemed to be doing some kind of ritual. They kept tossing buckets of worms and praying. We weren't really sure what was going on but it looked pretty cool.

Starfish

You can't really tell in this picture but these are little tiny clams, they were each only about 1-1.5 cm wide and they were all over the rocks we were walking on.