Seoul lantern festival

Edit june 13th 2013: I know the video links are down.  I’ll get them back up, I promise.

The Seoul lantern festival was held over three days, May 14th, 15th and 16th.  Activities included going to a temple and making your own lantern, temple tours and a free parade. Oddly enough many Koreans have never been to the parade themselves.  They have a very “I can go to this parade anytime” attitude towards it. This is another picture and video intensive post, it could take some while to load on slow connections, just be patient!

Me and my Korean friend ended up gong early and stealing a nice little spot in between the reserved foreigner seating and the sidewalk.  Behind us there was a large green power utility box about shoulder high covered with dust.  Three old Korean guys found some flattened cardboard boxes to sit on and set themselves up on it.  The first box the found was only large enough for two of them to sit on, so one of the guys took off looking for one more box that he could sit on.  We were in between them and the street fence separating the reserved seating for foreigners who had participated in the guided temple visit and lantern making activities.

On the other side of the small fence there was a sign on the chairs that indicated “for foreigners” and the three old men tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the reserved areas saying in Korean “you can go sit there”.  I simply waved them off with a smile because me and my Korean friend had borrowed chairs from the area and had set ourselves up nicely.  (We considered having my Korean friend speak only in English and sitting there but I actually preferred where and how we had setup ourselves up).

Finally the third old guy came back with another cardboard box and now needed a hand getting up onto the green electrical box with his buddies.  I got up, used the little of the Korean I know and told him to step up using my chair and gave him a little help.

This must of earned me some “old guy Korean credits” because from that point on these guys just loved me!  If you’ve seen the Japanese animation called Cowboy Bebop, there are these three old men who are always sitting together, playing cards, drinking or arguing.  These old fellows completely reminded me of those characters!

The pictures in this post are a little off, because the lighting was very tricky.  Unfortunately we when we sat down it wasn’t dark yet.  Once the sun fell I noticed that the neon lighting from across the street was making it difficult to capture clear crisp pictures.  Noticing this I switched to the video camera on my phone.  I was impressed by the quality of the video, which you’ll be able to view for yourself below.

Let’s start with some of the pictures from the start of the parade:

Earlier in the afternoon I was walking through the Insadong neighborhood which is know for it’s traditional arts, crafts and galleries.  This neighborhood is near my hostel and while walking I couldn’t help but hear the sound of banging drums.  I kept following the sound until I arrived in a little back alley to discover one of the parade groups ‘warming up’.  Here’s the first video, please note all of these videos have sound!

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Below I have several videos from the actual parade itself, including the the folks that had been practicing earlier.  I realize at the moment that the video gallery is not very nice to look at.  I’m hoping to get this looking nicer in the future but I just want to get it up for everyone to see.  Keep in mind that this was taken with my nexus one telephone! (pretty good quality videos from a phone…)

Each of the pictures below can be clicked on and the video will load after a few seconds.  Be patient the videos can take a few minutes to load! If you’re only going to watch one or two, I highly recommend the last two videos!

When we finally got up to leave the three old Koreans guys tapped me on the shoulder with large smiles on their faces; they gave me a thumbs up sign and waved goodbye. It made my night….
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