Colorful Daegu Festival

Colorful Daegu is the slogan for the city. It is plastered around here on anything and everything. Yun Kyeong (Carrie) from Taekwondo told me about the Colorful Daegu Festival the last time we were in class. I was disappointed because I thought we were going to have to miss it because we were in Jinju for the lantern festival this weekend. I'm really happy that we got to go yesterday though!

We got off the train from Jinju on Sunday evening, and we went downtown to try to find the textbook for the new Korean class we started on Friday. Unfortunately, both of the large bookstores in Daegu were sold out of the book, so we have to order it online. I'm glad we decided to go downtown though because we got to see everything going on. We met up with Yun Kyeong by the Colorful Daegu parade route. First, we were hungry, so Yun Kyeong took us for dinner at a sushi restaurant. We got all you can eat sushi for one hour, and there was a buffet section with drinks, salad, desserts, and soups as well. The sushi was really good, and I'm glad we know that exists now. IT was only about 16,000 won per person. After dinner, we walked back to watch the Colorful Daegu Parade. Daegu is
really trying to promote multiculturalism I think. First was the Daegu Sharing Life Festival, and now, this parade was trying to demonstrate cultures from around the world. During the parade, dub step electronic music was played in the background and no one seemed to question it! So crazy. I had no idea what was going on during most of the parade. It seemed like a lot of things within Daegu were represented, including schools, other festivals, and organizations. It was definitely not a cohesive parade. There were so many kinds of costumes and floats and things happening. There were lights along the parade route, an MC announcing what was coming up next, and fake snow coming down all over the place. It was a pretty interesting sight to behold.


After the parade, we walked down to the small stage where Yun Kyeong's friend's band would be playing a few songs. The band is called JJJ, and they do sort of a funky fusion of Korean and Western music. Really cool to listen to. There were two Koreans and two Americans in the band. On the way down to the stage, we caught a street performance involving two people dressed as large aliens dancing to the music created by people playing different sections of what looked like a parade float they built. It wasn't part of the parade though! It was really weird, but cool. We also caught a comedy performance after JJJ played. It was a crazy dude that was sort of talking and singing and wearing a really wild shirt. I had no idea what was going on, but I still found it hilarious because of what he was doing. I'll post some videos from the festival.

After the performance, we walked down "art street" and bought some hand-made crafts. I got a pretty bracelet and a robot love necklace, and Gianni got some pins of the little characters from the space invaders game. I'm really glad we went downtown even though we were tired after just getting back from Jinju. The Colorful Daegu festival was a great time. I really love living here, and it was nice to appreciate that for a bit.