The Jinju Namgang Yudeung Festival is a spectacular site to behold. The beautifully made lanterns are lit as wishes for world peace and fortune for mankind. There were lanterns on land and lanterns in the river. When I first heard of this festival I was picturing a scene from Disney's Tangled where floating lanterns are lit and float into the sky filling it with sparkling lights. I was very much wrong. The lanterns in Korea are made from a silk-like material that is stretched over a wire frame, then painted. The beautifully detailed larger then life lanterns were awe inspiring and so fun to see.
Our first stop at the festival was the Music Fountain area where lanterns littered the entire area. This was an extremely kid-friendly area, since the lanterns were made to resemble famous cartoon characters. Monster especially loved all the "Good Guys!" as he ran around pointing out Batman, Spiderman, Ironman and more.
All of the kids loved the life size dinosaur that was made and shaped to look as if it was eating them.
M&M and Little A especially loved the unicorn. Not only was the unicorn life size and beautiful, but the artist made it so kids could sit on the unicorn, ride it (it had springs on the feet), and take a picture.
Another super neat lantern was the dinosaur slide. Some amazing artist made a lantern slide that was shaped as a dinosaur and then made the tail into a slide. All the kids had a blast sliding down the dinosaur lantern slide.
Since the festival was in such a large area, the city created floating bridges to make it easier and faster to get across the river to see all the exhibits. We paid 5,000 won a person to get unlimited access to all the bridges. We crossed the bridge and made our way over to the Chokseoklu, Jinjuseong castle. The entire grounds of the Chokseoklu was covered in so many lanterns. There was an entire area that looked like a village that was made of all lanterns. My favorite was a small pavilion that was a lantern. I seriously thought it was real until I walked right up to it and knocked on it. There were even lantern trees that were in the lantern village. It was something pretty neat.
After we crossed the bridge, we came to an endless lantern tunnel filled with gorgeous red and blue lanterns.
As we walked into the tunnel, all the lanterns came on and we found ourselves surrounded by a red glow of lights. I learned that these lanterns contain wishes, dreams and desires of all the people from the area. They write their stories on the lanterns then hang them up. It was neat being in a tunnel of wishes and dreams. It was almost as if the lanterns were whispering to us.
When we exited the tunnel, we noticed that some of the lanterns were lit up nice and bright. It was fun to look across the river and see the Chokeoklu brightly shining.
We spent the last hour oohing and awing over the lanterns that were lit up. Seeing the silk-like material all painted during the daylight was pretty neat, but seeing it with lights under to illuminate the lantern was something else entirely different and magical. I loved every second of it.
As the light from the sky kept disappearing and darkness started creeping in, I was sad to hear the announcement that the typhoon had knocked out a lot of the light sources and many of the lanterns would not be working tonight. By the time we left about 1/3 of the lanterns were lit up. It was a little saddening to come all this way and not see all the lanterns in their glory, but what we were able to see was pretty amazing.
Another reason the festival was wonderful is because we had amazing friends to share it with. I am so glad we had the Budenbenders, Livaudais and the Schwartz to celebrate the festival with us.
As we were crossing the street to wait in line for the bus, Corianne texted and said more lights just got fixed. I begged Kevin if we could run back and see them. He wasn't too happy about walking all the way back just to look at 'something we already saw', as he put it, but he was sweet enough to indulge me and and walk back so I could see the lights. It was fun seeing such vibrant colors in the darkness. It reminded me of a quote by Robert D. Hales, "Light and darkness cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Light dispels darkness. When light is present, darkness is vanquished and must depart. More importantly, darkness cannot conquer light unless the light is diminished or departs." I just wanted to see all the light that took over the darkness. It was beautiful and worth the walk back.
No comments:
Post a Comment