It's Morning

Just got up a bit ago after a solid night of doing nothing but watching "The Office" online and munching Korean rice snacks. Oh, and I accidentally kicked Papa Hamster as he was rolling around the apartment in his exercise ball. Oh and I also stubbed my big toe, which led me to look at my foot and realize that the toe next to it--the one I broke on the family cruise a couple years ago--has grown way more crooked than I'd thought possible. In fact, it's growing so far to the left that it's making the one next to it crooked too. Pointer toe: "Hey man, I'm going this way... wanna come?" Middle toe: "Sure dude, screw conformity!" I think I may soon venture a visit to the foot doctor, but that's risky; knowing my luck with doctors here I'll probably end up in the proctologist's office and be laughed out of the hospital for telling him about my foot problems... "Wrong floor again, you stupid waegook!*"

Last weekend was the Busan Fireworks Festival at Gwangali Beach, some 15 minutes from my apartment. Nobody I've talked to, including Koreans, knows exactly what the celebration is for, or why they picked the middle of October to put on the fireworks show, but who cares? Fireworks! We'd heard that the show was a pretty big deal, and that it gets pretty crowded at the beach, but wow--we had no idea. We got there at about 4pm, four hours before the show was to start. We had no trouble snagging an area on the sand, where it was relatively uncrowded, but by 7pm the place was a zoo. Never in my life have I seen so many people in one place. (News reports the next day said that over a million people had shown up at the beach) Anyways, lasting 45 minutes and being synchronized with music, the fireworks show was amazing, even surpassing anything I saw in Beijing for the Chinese New Year's celebration. It helped that the fireworks were shot from the stunningly-beautiful Gwangan Bridge, which spans across the bay. I wish my camera was better--most of the pictures I snapped were real blurry, but here are some of the better ones. And a couple videos (which I'm sure will not play properly, grrrr). Oh, and make sure the volume isn't turned up high :-D