Festival for coming true your desire.

This post is far overdue.  Since it's exam time, though, and I'm an expert procrastinator, now seems like the perfect time to play a little blogging 'catch up.'

From October 1 - 12, Jinju, a town in the southern part of South Korea, hosts the Namgang Lantern Festival, when the river lights up with hundreds of lanterns.  The story goes that many years ago, when the town was besieged by the Japanese, Korean military leaders sent messages on lanterns down the river to their home city.

Vroni had done some great research on different festivals around Korea and, for the past 5 years, the Jinju Lantern Festival had been rated as one of the top festivals - so Vroni, Susanna, and I were off for opening weekend!

We took the subway to Express Bus Terminal station, and the Express Bus Station was part of the subway building complex.  We found the ticket counter easily enough, and there were seats on the next bus - that was headed out in 15 minutes!  We grabbed some freshly made kimbap - yum! - and jumped on board.  And I fell in love with Korean express buses.  Instead of four seats across, there were only three.  The seats were huge, and they reclined to be almost completely horizontal!

Four and a half hours later, after some great scenery filled with villages in valleys, towering mountains, rolling streams, some napping, and a couple albums of Regina Spektor, we arrived in Jinju!  We found our way from the Express Bus Station to the center of the city because Vroni has a wicked sense of direction and I'm clever enough to tell directions by the position of the sun.  Found a hotel easily enough - and it was right on the river!  They didn't speak English at the reception desk, though, of course, so we got to use our extensive vocabulary to communicate - "See?" "How much?" 

Vroni and Mulan, shooting arrows!

We spent the day visiting a fortress on the cliffs over the river, shooting bows and arrows at the fortress (I now prefer to go by the name "Mulan," thank you very much.), and checking out the street vendors.  Little white tents lined the riverside filled with every type of food and non-food product you could imagine - cinnamon-filled pita bread, shark, eel, underwear, cleaning brushes, and dream-catchers!  That's what really got me - in the United States, it's a kind of running joke that the Native Americans worm their way into every fair or carnival.  Imagine my surprise when, in the middle of South Korea, there were Native Americans playing their mouth harps just like in the States! Crazy.

Festival food - yum!

I think that's shark on the left?

During the evening, we made some amazing lanterns of our own.  Vroni made a flower one, and Susanna and I collaborated on a very intricate fish. As they were wish lanterns, we wrote our wishes on them in our languages.  The Finnish, German, and English stood out in the sea of Korean!  We finished  just in time to watch the fireworks!  The fireworks were great and utilized many hearts. Koreans are much more vocal than most Americans while watching fireworks; they were cheering and screaming and shouting with glee! After the fireworks, we stared at the amazing lanterns for quite a while.  The lanterns were in every shape imaginable - dragons, traditional Korean ceremonies, a panda, some dalmatians, the Statue of Liberty, athletes from the Olympics... and their reflections were beautiful upon the water!  Throughout the day, we were pretty much the only westerners to be seen.  People would come up to us and offer us tea or ask where we are from or just say "Hello!" or "Yepuda!" (which means "pretty").  Being the object of such curiosity is a new experience for me, but I couldn't get over how nice everyone was!

Our new friends!

For example, wandering around at night, we passed the "religious" tents.  A man came running after us and pulled us back, where a group of people made us try some rice cakes and then had us sit down while they served us some tea.  A man, who was apparently some important religious man at a temple, took an interest in us and started speaking to us quite a bit - all in Korean.  A woman translated some, but he kept going on and on so much that she couldn't keep up!  They took us out to dinner to try some traditional Korean food and drink rice wine.  The rice wine is served in bowls and is a cloudy, milky color.  It was strange to be toasting a religious elder with bowls of rice wine!  Not quite something I imagine doing with the Catholic priests...

To finish the night, and really show how much we love each other, Susanna, Vroni, and I took a walk through a bamboo forest that turned out to be couple-land!  Check out the pictures below for some of the otrociously amazing and strange kitsch that greeted us!  Yes, they ARE doing what you think they are doing!

Sleeping on the floor, Korean style!

 

I slept ondol style that night for the first time.  Which basically means I slept on a blanket on the floor.  But, overall, I'm glad I slept on the floor - it was the final piece in a totally Korean weekend!  The next morning we wandered around some more, checked out a famous silk store, ate lunch, and took the bus for home!