Floral Parade 07

Floral Fest is a monthly event held in January 2007 in conjunction with visit Malaysia Year 2007. The Floral Fest consists of numerous events including a photography contest, a florathon, and a floral parade. The floral parade is an annual event and this year event was held on 27th January 2007 in Putrajaya, Malaysia’s administrative capital.

There were 19 floats decorated with fresh and colourful flowers and 18 marching bands in the parade and reports had put the number of spectators in the 50,000 range.

The atmosphere was joyous and children and grown ups were visibly excited of the whole affair but I guess some are a bit too excited and had become an annoyance. During the parade, these overly excited people started to get over the barricades. They would craw, climb, jump, roll, and do whatever is necessary to cross the barricades to be as close to the floats as possible and this has annoyed other rules abiding spectators like yours truly and not to mention they also hindered the movement of the marching bands and floats.

Another unpleasant encounter at the parade was the invasion of photography enthusiasts. They, like the other overly excited spectators, would get as close to the floats as possible to take pictures and in the process block the view and shots of other rules abiding spectators. They do not have the common courtesy to at least get out of the way after taking their shots but would instead just hang around the floats and continue to block others’ views. These people might be professional photographers (probably self-proclaimed), they were surely using some professional gears, and the pictures they captured could very well be of professional quality but their ethnics were far from one of a professional’s.

Below are the pictures I tool at the parade. Don’t be surprise to see these ‘professional’ photographers in some of the shots.

There are 40 pictures in this post. All pictures were taken with my Fujifilm Finepix S9500.