Jinju Lantern Festival 2013

  After hearing many great things about the Lantern Festival in Jinju, I was very excited to finally go see it! A group of us girls that hang out a lot decided to make a day trip and travel the 2 hours by bus to see the lanterns. I was not expected the volume of lanterns that they had in this place!!!
As soon as we arrived in Jinju we found the festival and immediately started to make our own lantern. Sian, from South Africa, had been to the festival earlier in the week, so we had someone with a bit of knowledge of the layout and schedule. I think that the girls at the lantern making were quite concerned when we said that we all wanted to make our own lantern. I think they were just anticipating the amount of help that they would be giving us.
We spent the next couple of hours making a lantern. It was great to see the process that goes into making these lanterns, and hopefully in the future I can take some extra time and make a really extravagant one! I wanted to make a jayhawk. I don't know why, but for some reason I have jayhawks on my brain... Pretty sure it is the upcoming basketball season that is doing it! :) So stoked!
Anyways, I ended up making a cube, then switching Sian so she could make a lamp and ended up making a heart!

 They lit the lanterns at 6:00, so that left us and hour and a half to see as many lanterns as we could before we needed to catch a taxi back to the bus station. There were hundreds of lanterns! Many of the cool ones were on the river and they had made makeshift bidges that you could walk across to get a great view of them. The view was great to see them, but horrible to take pictures because this bridge was made out of floating jugs! It was like a bouncy castle going across, and you felt quite sea-sick or drunk as you were stumbling across! Not the ideal for taking long exposure photos! Oh well! I managed to get a few that weren't too bad...
The area of the lanterns was also huge, but this being said- there were sooooo many people. And in the nicest way possible I will also mention that Koreans are the most spatially unaware people I have ever been around! I could be one of two people on the sidewalk and I will still get bumped into! So, being at a festival on a time crunch with thousands of Koreans can get your anxiety level up! ahah

 This is Emily and I showing out love in a love heart!

 There was a tunnel of home-made lanterns that were made by the local high-schoolers in the area. This was my favorite part of the entire festival...Very cool! :)

 The evening did not end out the best. We had planned to get a taxi at 7:30, which gave us 30 minutes to get to the bus terminal. We had pre-bought our tickets to get the last bus leaving Jinju heading to Daegu, so we NEEDED to get on this bus or we spent the night in an already packed city.
We didn't realize that all of the streets would be shut down after a certain time so no taxi could even get close to the festival! We walked in the direction of the bus station hoping to find one, but with no luck! We RAN to the terminal and made it with 3 minutes to spare! Scary and very stressful! We made it though!
I could have spent hours at this festival though. I had heard that they keep the lanterns lit until 2:00 am, so ideally I would spend the night there and photograph once most of the people left! I have a game plan now if I ever get back to this festival! :)