Seoul 2015 Lantern Festival

 

The Seoul Lantern festival was started in 2009 and is an annual festival held in November along the manmade stream Cheonggyecheon (청계천). It lasts two weeks and brightens the stream with it's paper lanterns of various sizes and styles. It runs the 1.9 km stretch from Cheonggye Plaza to Supyo Bridge.

Each year, the 4 sections of the festival will be currated according to the various theme chosen that year. The 2015 festival that I attended had themes as follows:
  • Theme 1: Amazing World heritage in Seoul
  • Theme 2: From local governments and overseas invitation
  • Theme 3: Corporation and the character
  • Theme 4: Light Art author show

The pictures below were taken from my favorite section: the world heritage theme. Here there were first many lanterns depicting the famous things or places of Korea, then there were a few lanterns to represent other countries...

Japan's Lantern
India and China's Lantern
USA's Lantern

The lantern above depicted a common scene of a Korean restaurant or street food stand. Below is a scene of some men wearing hanbok (the traditional clothing) and making something (I think they were suppose to be making more lanterns).



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Seoul Trick Eye Museum

Image
Our last day in Seoul for the long May weekend, we went to a couple places. The first, located in Hongdae, was the Trick Eye Museum. It's an amazingly fun place set up purely to take funny and awesome photographs due to the optical illusions painted in the space. Each work is accompanied by instructions and an example photo to show you how to take the best picture illusion. Here are some of the ones we took that worked out the best.   In addition to our purchase of a ticket to the Trick Eye Museum, we received a complementary admission to the ice museum next door. This place was smaller, but it was fun, too. It was SO COLD inside though (obviously it needed to be).
Read more

Day trip to Daegu

Image
Daegu is the 4th largest city in Korea and only a 20 min KTX ride north of Ulsan. (of course it takes an hour and a half for me to GET to the KTX station...) One Sunday, a giant group of us decided to take a day trip to the giant city to go zip-lining at a ropes course that one in the group had heard good things about. The time we were here was the peak of fall colors in the area and everything was gorgeous, not to mention the perfect fall temperature. It was chilly, but just enough that a sweater was enough to keep you warm: my favorite kind of weather. The park was called Herb Hillz (yes, with a 'z') and it included many aspects in addition to the suspended ropes course including tons of gardens, a small zoo and a small amusement park.   Before we were allowed up in the trees, they had us go through a little practice course that was a few feet off the ground. The staff members don't go up into the trees with you like many zip-l...
Read more

A Korean Wedding

Image
Two weeks before the event itself, the landlord of my apartment (whom I know very well and am friendly with) messaged me to invite my neighbor and I to his son's wedding! This surprising method of invitation was the first of many things I would learn about Korean weddings. Firstly, there are 2 types of weddings: "traditional" and "western". Traditional weddings are extremely rare, barely anyone opts to have them anymore, but many of its little practices still show through in the Korean interpretation of the "western" wedding. This is the wedding hall in which I attended the wedding. As you can see, it's very showy. The center aisle and the front area is actually a stage. These giant halls are rented for just the ceremony. A business or building that runs them usually has several and on a given day (especially Saturdays), there are usually many weddings going on at the same time, and 3-4 lined up in the same event hall for the same day, get...
Read more