Pohang Fireworks Festival

One of my goals I had when I came to Korea was to see fireworks here. Two friends and I traveled to the Pohang Fireworks Festival to kick off our summer vacation. We flew to Pohang from Seoul. The flight was only 1 hour and it only cost us around $50.00.

We knew the trip was going to be eventful when we discovered 10 minutes prior to boarding that my friend had thrown away her boarding pass. This is not a big deal in Korea. The just issued her a new one no questions asked and we were on our way. Domestic flights in Korea are pretty relaxed. There's no liquid restriction in carry on luggage and I made it on the plane with a razor.

We arrived and asked a cab to take us to a love hotel near the fireworks festival. He didn't understand the word fireworks and none of us know the Korean word so we showed him a picture and 2 of his cab driver friends helped clarify. They started making a sound like "Pop, pop!"

We went rode into town and the roads near the festival were closed off. The cab driver drove up to a volunteer who was manning the barrier and told him, "I have foreigners in my car that need help finding a hotel can I drive through?" The volunteer let us through so we were the only people in a car on this strip of the street. I tell ya being a foreigner here has its perks sometimes.

We went to check into a hotel and the man was really excited to have us there. He started yelling at his middle school aged son to speak English to us but his son refused. It was pretty funny because the dad was really angry at the kid.

We then set out to find a cheap t-shirt. One of my friends that came with me, had just returned from Malaysia and didn't have any clean clothes. We went to the Lotte Department store and things were grossly over priced. There were a group of policeman who were dancing and eating kimbap on the street so we decided to ask them were to find a cheap t-shirt.

My friend asked them in English first but none of them responded so she resorted to the Korean she knows (cheap, t-shirt, where). She rambled about Lotte not being cheap and finally the police officer interrupted her with, "Excuse me, do you speak English?" This is by far my favorite quote of the trip. I guess he didn't like the butchering she was doing in Korean. He then advised us to go to the traditional market to find the shirt. We wandered over there and found a t-shirt for 3,000 ($2.00). They even had t-shirts from the Athens Olympic games although I doubt that they are authentic. We headed back to our hotel only to discover that my friend had left the shirt in the cab.

We tried to buy a shirt from the volunteers at the festival but they didn't understand what we wanted and it ended up being a big photo shoot. We had to take pictures with lots of volunteers and children. I really have no idea what was going on.

The search for a t-shirt left us hungry so we decided to get something to eat and were enticed by a whole pig that was being roasted on the side of the street. It was absolutely delicious but midway through the meal we saw his brother hanging on the pole covered in black trash bags ready to be thrown on the fire next. Sad day. See picture above. If you look closely, you can see one of its hooves.

We were now ready to enjoy the fireworks. They were amazing! They were all set to music and were lit off over the ocean. There were two teams that participated. One team was from France and the other was from Korea. They lit off over 48,000 fireworks! I was told by my Korean friends that the festival was much smaller this year than in previous years but it was still a great show. Here's a sample of what we saw. The video quality isn't the greatest but what can you expect from a digital camera.

I'll be blogging more about my vacation over the next week. I managed to cram a lot of stuff into one week!