Cheongdo Bullfight Festival

A few weekends ago, I had the chance to go to a Bullfighting Festival down in the Southern part of South Korea. Korea is about the size of Indiana, so for those of you keeping track, it would be the rough equivalent of me living in South Bend and driving down to somewhere around Bloomingtom.

If you look on this map, I was in Gyeongsangnam-Do, about where the "ng" in "sang" is. I live up where the blue number 1 is. 

When most people think of bull fighting, they think of the Spanish style bullfighting between a matador and the bull. 

(source)

Something like that. Korean style bullfighting is quite different. It is perhaps a little more like bull wrestling. There are two bulls in the ring, and they lock horns and have a very extended staring contest until one of them decides he has had enough and turns tail and runs away. Some of the fights lasted quite a long time (upwards of 30 minutes) and some of them were quite short (much closer to 30 seconds). We got to see five rounds when we were there. Here are some of my favorite pictures from the day!

The guys in the red and blue jackets are the trainers. They got really close to the bulls while they were fighting. 

The end of one of the fights.

He's probably only a few meters away from those guys. Crazy!

In America, you can go to a baseball game and buy a hot dog. In Korea, you can go to a bullfight and buy a giant back of rice cakes. 

This is probably my favorite bull related picture of the day. 

It wasn't all testosterone and fighting there though. There were lots of cute things, like this little boy that I don't know posing with the fuzzy mascots. 

There was an outdoor art display with various life-size or bigger models of bulls made from different materials. 

In addition to the rice cakes, you could buy dried squid tentacles.

Some of the bulls were perhaps less intimidating than others...

There were some school kids that had designed and were running robotic bull fights. It was pretty cool. 

We got the chance to walk around the countryside a little bit, and there were some beautiful cherry blossoms! Most of the cherry blossom pictures I posted earlier were from this trip.