Here are some pictures I snapped at the Chinese New Year Parade. Though I enjoyed the parade, I'm not entirely sure that celebrating the beginning of the Year of the Pig was the only reason for the event. At first glance, it was pretty much what I expected to see. The streets were decorated with Chinese lanterns...

There were some absolutely gorgeous floats...





There were kids practicing martial arts...


And some kids just being cute....


The boy scouts made an appearance...


And of course there were Dragons...



After a little while, I began to notice the advertisements. At first they were fairly subtle. Ford was a sponsor and threw a couple of cars and trucks into the parade...


Soon the ads were less subtle , but consistent with the parade decor...



Some parts of the parade were just a stream of billboards...

It would be naive to think that this parade could be possible without help from sponsors. As the old adage goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. But you would think that after choking down so many ads, the sponsors could at least throw in some free dessert at the end. As it turns out, Fortune was not so kind...
I initially thought that all the advertisements cheapened the parade and that culture was being replaced by rampant commercialism. Having very limited foreign travel experience, I assumed that turning cultural events into advertisements was a uniquely American custom. After finding the following picture of downtown Shanghai I realized that commerce is a big part of all cultures and that my experience was probably very close to what it would be like to be at a New Year parade in a major city in China....Though there was definitely something about it that was uniquely San Franciscan.