cherry blossom festival

There are now a lot of new photos in my Picasa web albums for April. They include a trip to Seoul last weekend, a couple of rides with William, and another trip to Seoul this weekend for the Cherry Blossom Festival with two friends.

It wasn't a festival like we were expecting. It mainly involved hundreds of people walking along the road under the cherry trees and taking pictures. It didn't matter though, the pink cherry blossoms were beautiful! The cherry trees have only been blooming for about a week, but they're already starting to lose their flowers. At times it looked like it was snowing flower petals. By the end of next week they'll probably be completely green, like some of the other trees. I love the green and pink together in the photo above.There were no games for kids, vendors selling toys or artwork, or any of the normal things usually seen at a festival, but there were some cool flower and photo displays from a contest. I thought this jeans one was pretty original.......but I thought the bull was by far the best. All the placards were in Korean so I don't know which displays won something in the contest. Maybe it wasn't even a contest, but it seemed like it probably was.
In addition to the blooming cherry blossoms, there were also lots of flower pots with a wide variety of flowers.
And more magnolia trees, this time of the pink variety.I have to include a few parting "ick" shots. A food vendor was selling silkworms and some sort of shelled animal that I haven't seen anywhere else. The silkworms are very common.