KoInMo Opening Ceremony 2013

The Korea In Motion Festival (KOINMO) is a month long festival organized by the Korean Tourism Organization geared to promote purchase of tickets to Seoul's various variety shows at half price. This years festival will run from September 1st through September 30th, and kicked off with an opening ceremony on Saturday August 31st, at the entrance of Seoul's popular Cheonggye Stream. Once again, the KTO generously provided me and a friend with tickets to this event, so right about 4:00 o'clock I collected our tickets and then hung around until the event started at 6:00 p.m..  The opening ceremony pretty much consisted of several shows performing parts of their sets, I guess as a preview to what audiences could expect if they bought tickets to the show. My favorite was Sachoom, they were a boy and girl dance crew who performed really well despite the rain and the stage being slippery. To close out the ceremony, the famous K-Pop group MBLAQ came on state to accept their plaque as they are these years KOINMO ambassadors. After receiving their plaque, and giving a brief speech MBLAQ performed some of their biggest hits, and it quickly became clear that most of the people in the audience had attended specifically to see them perform.

I really appreciated the fact that unlike past KTO events, this one had MCs who spoke not only Korean, but also translated into English. Many times I attend events that I'm sure are really terrific and entertaining, but because they are all in Korean I tend to zone out whenever the performance stops and they just carry on talking. The only thing I was disappointed with, was that there seemed to be no preparation taken in case of inclement weather, which was the case on Saturday. The clouds had been looming over for the better part of the afternoon, but for whatever reason it failed to register in my mind that perhaps I should bring an umbrella out with me. I would say about 15 minutes into the start of the ceremony rain started to fall rather heavily, some people whom I'm assuming were pretty important, got handed raincoats right away while the rest of us were left there to get wet. Luckily, I was able to dash into a convenience store and buy an umbrella before they sold out, but those who weren't as lucky, had two choices: a) leave and miss the performance or b) stick it out and get soaking wet. So my suggestion to those who organize these events, specially if it is an outdoor one, is to prepare a back up plan in case the weather doesn't cooperate.

Below are a few photos from the ceremony.