Kayla's South Korean Adventure: Seoul Lantern Festival

Yesterday, I went to the Seoul Lantern Festival. I went with a friend that I met during my stay in Korea. She also knows Korean so that is a big help sometimes too. All the lanterns were very beautiful. It is located on the famous Cheonggyecheon Stream in downtown Seoul. The theme for the lanterns is 'Old Story of Seoul.' So a lot of the lanterns that were displayed represented activities or folklore from the history of Korea. There were also lanterns that were made by international artists as well as local artist.

A funny thing happened when we were at the festival. We wanted to get in line so that we can walk down next to the stream, as opposed to looking at them from above on the sides. We started walking next to the line wanting to find the end, but it kept going on and on, with no sign of the end. We decided to ask one of the security guards how long it will take to get through the line and he told us 3 hours. We were flabbergasted. We didn't have time to stand in line for 3 hours, plus the night was starting to get chilly.

So we decided to just walk around on the side of the stream from above. We really wanted to go down to the stream but 3 hours was too long. As we were walking, we walked probably half way (by the way this stream is very long) and then we noticed a rope tied to the trees next to the wall to look over down on the stream. We were wondering why there was a rope and then we started noticing ducking under the rope and getting in line. We were unsure of what they were doing so we did it too. We then peeked as far as we can over the wall to see if there were a set of stairs ahead of them that people were going down and it turned out we had gotten in a line to go down by the stream. The line was empty as we were walking by it, but all of a sudden the line filled up very fast. It took us only about 5 min to stand in line and head down the stairs. We were lucky from having to only stand in line for 5 min compared to the 3 hours.

Once we got to the bottom, the crowd at the bottom were walking in the direction to the beginning of the stream, so we decided to use one of the small bridged that crossed over the river so we can could continue in the direction we had come from. These lanterns went on forever. We had no idea when it would end, but eventually it did, and we crossed back over the river and go back towards the beginning. It was all very fun. I was excited we got to view them a little more up close.