Nic Trips

  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...

The Boryeong Mud Festival is one of the biggest and probably the most highly recommended festival in all of Korea. Although it's no longer "traditionally" focused and has been completely taken over by young adults (both Koreans AND foreigners), it is a crazy amount of fun. But, maybe I'm just saying that because I'm a young adult. The festival happens over 8 days and is filled with a plethora of activities surrounding mud: giant mud pools or baths, mud wrestling, the blow-up mud slides and obstacle courses that you see below, colored mud painting, parades, fireworks and music shows. This year, there was even a show of these jets, streaming colored smoke by the "Black Eagles". The festival attracts thousands of people, plenty of which are photographers participating in the annual contest of who can take the best photos to capture the action, excitement and fun. Of course the goal of the weekend for any participants is to get as muddy a...

On Sunday, March 22nd,  the other half of our weekend trip, we headed back towards the east side of the country towards our giant neighboring city of Busan. On Haeundae Beach on the southeast side of the city, there was a giant celebration for Holi Hai. Holi Hai is an ancient Hindu festival held in spring. It's also called the 'festival of colors'. It primarily involves a massive singing and dancing party while colors are thrown and rain down everywhere. People use powdered colors as well as colored water or even wet paint to throw at other participants or just into the air to rain down on everyone. There is a large population of Indians living in Korean that likely brought this festival to Busan every spring, but in recent years the celebration has become very popular among other non-Hindu, southeast Asian countries and of course the many open-minded and adventurous foreigners that travel there.   I left my camera on the bus because I didn't have any...

Korea is home to a plethora of unique and exciting festivals that I didn't learn about until coming here. One of which, we traveled nearly 5 hours in a bus to the other side of the country to experience on Saturday: the Jindo Sea Parting Festival. Jindo is an island in the southwest corner of Korea, connected to the mainland by some bridges. It is surrounded by many other smaller islands, one of which famously forms a "land bridge" each day, just as the tide changes to it lowest point. Although this formation happens twice a day, all year long, the local residents host a festival once a year to celebrate the natural phenomenon and the ancient story that accompanies it. In order to experience this festival we had heard many good things about, we booked a tour/trip through EnjoyKorea. This 2-day trip also included lodging and transportation to a festival in Busan that was happening the following day. My friends and I had done a ski trip through this company in December...