Lantern Festival

Things you would only find in Korea-Part 2:

  Underwear for sale at a subway stop.

 This was an entire undergarments store in a subway stop.  I guess you never know when you are going to need a new pair of underwear.  Who needs a Victoria's Secret store when you can get your underwear in the subway?
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 Seoul has a lot of festivals.  There seems to be a festival for everything here.  They have a rice festival, a migrating bird festival, a mud festival, a fireworks festival (which we attended and it was awesome...unfortunately I was very sick and didn't get any good pictures...next year I will post a blog about it), a drum festival, a photography festival and about a thousand others.

One festival that caught my eye was the Lantern Festival.   I did some research and found out that each year local and international artists create hundreds of lanterns interpreting the theme for that year's festival.  The theme for this year was "Seoul's Roots, the Lifestyles of Our Ancestors".  The lanterns depicted scenes from the days of the Joseon Dynasty (late 1300's) to present day.  The lanterns were set up on a man-made river that runs through a part of Seoul.

We recently had 2 different visitors and this festival was the perfect thing to do with visitors to Seoul.  The first time we went to see the lanterns we went with our friend Mr. Chino.  As you may know from previous blog posts, we became friends with Chino and his family back in North Carolina.  Unfortunately, Chino received unaccompanied orders to Korea for a year.  We were excited when we also received orders a few months later to Korea that we would be able to spend holidays with him.  He works about 2 hrs train ride from Seoul but often comes up for special events or holidays.  He came up for the first MC Ball we attended and stayed with us a few days after.  We first went to the lantern festival with him.

On the subway with Mr. Chino heading to the festival.

There were literally hundreds of lanterns.  I won't post pictures of all of them, but I will post a few of my favorites.

This was the first lantern that was displayed as you walked up to the festival.  It is guards protecting a gate that leads into Seoul.

There is a large fortress wall that surrounds a part of Seoul.  It at one time was used as protection for Seoul.  The wall was built between 4 mountains and had a total of 8 gates.   Much of the wall is still in tact today (there will be future blog posts about this fortress wall and it's gates) and 6 of the 8 gates are still in existence.  This lantern shows the fortress wall and a few of the gates.

The guards that used to protect the gates.  They are not to scale, the gates are huge.

A family picture at the beginning of the river.  This is where the lanterns started.

Russ and Chino looking down the river at the lanterns.

These cool lanterns were under a bridge on the river.

These were lanterns of kids from all over the world.

I have no idea how these next lanterns fit into the theme, but they were fun to look at.  The girls were excited because they recognized these lanterns.

These are very popular kids characters in Korea right now.

This is just a few of the many lanterns on the river.  It was pretty awesome to see them all lit up.

They had these paper bricks you could purchase and write a message of love on them.  An entire wall was full of them.

You could also purchase a small paper lantern to decorate and send down the river.  Mr. Chino bought each of the girls their own lantern and they had fun decorating them and putting them in the river.

This was a dragon of post-it notes that people had written messages on.

There was a Philippino band that was playing American songs.

We are in Korea watching a Philippino band play American songs and the crazy thing is how many of the Koreans knew every word of the songs.

The second visitor we recently had was Russ' Uncle Joe.  Uncle Joe was in Korea for the past month for his work.  He took a few days of leave after his project was completed and spent Thanksgiving with us.  We drug him all over Seoul and did a bunch of sightseeing.  The first place we went was the lantern festival.

The best part about the lantern festival is that is was free.  We will definitely go back again next year.