Seoul Lantern Festival

The Seoul Lantern Festival is something that recently fell into our laps.  For as big as Seoul is, there is a great sense of community in this city and something awesome is always going on.  If Kelly and I even knew half of what was going on in this city, we'd lose our minds.  This past Saturday a group of us went ice skating at Lotte World, an impressive indoor/outdoor amusement park.  The ice skating was fun, but was packed beyond expectation.  There were four types of skaters on the ice.  1.)  The speed skaters in training,  2.)  Figure skaters in training,  3.)  Terrible, terrible couples who were giggling and falling everywhere, and  4.)  The waeguks (aka the foreigners, us, the outsiders, the idiots who weren't any good at skating and got in everyone's way).  I'm mostly speaking on behalf of myself, as I may or may not have knocked down two kids.  Due to my lack of skills stopping on the ice, I could only say sorry as I skated past them offering no services of help (laughing to myself).

I don't really know a whole lot about the Seoul Lantern Festival, so I will copy and paste what the tourist website says.

"Under the theme of ‘Seoul, a source of beaming hope’, the festival will feature 15,000 lanterns of 213 variations and from 25 countries. Unique pieces of work from ‘Sibaraku Nebuta’ of Aomori, Japan; and ‘Iryongsangtu’ and ‘Byeongeomgamyeon’ of China will be invited for the exhibition and a range of other creative local works such as ‘Door of Hope’, ‘G20 Lantern’, and ‘Lantern of Global Harmony’ will be on display."


Anyway, there is this stream in Seoul called the "Cheonggyecheon" and it was recently opened in 2005.   According to Wikipedia, it required $900 million to renovate.  That's a lot of cash, but it's a money stream.  A large portion of this stream had massive lanterns in the middle of various kinds.  Observe below.

There were tons of lantern-esk things adorning this stream.  It was a great time with some great people.  We had a blast.  You can check out some more pictures on our flickr page.