Photos from the Lunar New Year parade and firecrackers display in Flushing

Last Saturday, Main Street in Flushing was more packed than usual, thanks to the Lunar New Year parade. After a brief snow flurry, a little sunshine peeked through the clouds and made for a pleasant day to welcome the Year of the Snake.

The parade started off with solid showing of Korean American organizations. One of the highlights from the Korean Lunar New Year contingent was a band of colorfully dressed marchers playing traditional Korean musical instruments such as these long trumpets called nabal.

Besides hanbok (traditional Korean clothing), many of the Korean marchers were wearing these awesome red, white and blue balloon “backpacks” – clusters of long, skinny balloons that resembled fireworks.

Next, several Chinese and Taiwanese American organizations (newspapers, political organizations, martial arts groups, and more) marched up Main Street. Many of them showed off lively lion dancers

And fierce dragons.

To the crowd’s delight, many groups popped confetti tubes liberally.

One of the most organized large groups was the Falun Dafa band, who marched by in perfectly straight rows.

Companies, schools and churches joined in, and hospitals even decorated ambulances for the occasion.

And of course, weaving through the parade was the ubiquitous Oswaldo Gomez, also known as Miss Colombia or the Queen of Queens, our borough’s most well-known and colorful drag queen with the bushy beard and pet poodle and bird. Everywhere he goes, crowds love him.

At the end of the parade, spectators flocked to the Queens Crossing Mall, where firecrackers were set up in front of Paris Baguette, the Korean bakery chain. (The MTA’s posters had misleadingly advertised a “fireworks display.”) The loud pops and flashes of light made their way up several long red ribbons, finally exploding a pair of compactly rolled firecrackers with a more forceful bang.