Jinju Lantern Festival

Monday night, I decided at the last minute to go check out another festival about an hour southeast of Daegu. October is festival season here alot like how Utah has all their different city "days" celebrations--like Strawberry Days or Steel Days. This particular festival blew all other festivals out of the water. Without a doubt, this was the most amazing thing we have done in Korea. The giant lanterns filled the river for about a mile. They had all kinds of different dancing people, dragons, Chinese landscape scenes, magical creatures as giant, beautifully lit lanterns. The whole area glowed. It was phenomenal.

There were so many people pushing and shoving and moving around. It sort of stressed me out because it's a little difficult to hang on to six kids (Oakley stayed home) in mayhem like that. However, the nice thing about what I like to call "Asian Crazy" is that American children stand out fairly well.

Chloe is always making jokes about riding away on a unicorn into the sky. When she saw this she was so excited she knocked over all the other Koreans trying to get a picture atop a glowing unicorn.

Gwynyth's nickname is "El Toro" because she can be such a bull in a china shop. So we couldn't miss a picture of this.

This dragon spit fire. It was so awesome, but when it spit fire the first time, it took Diamond by surprise and he about wet his pants.

Sophia and tigers. . . does anyone else see the link here? She is so much like her mama. Watch out world!

There were food vendors all along the side of the river. We would just randomly get things and try them. We found some yummy food this way. . . and some not as yummy food. One of the best things to do when living in a foriegn country is to try new food to eat. However, one must realize that it doesn't always end well.

There was a giant bamboo forest on the edge of the river. They had put all these little lanterns of wild life out in the bamboo grove. It was beautiful. Really, the whole thing was unbelievable.

Ahhh. . . I know, so cheesy, Brian made me do it! I do have to just say how much I love that man. After 16 years, he's still my favorite guy in the world. Besides who else in this world could put up with my hyper-active, always moving, always need to find new adventures zest for life?

This is a picture of whale blubber stew. It was one of the grossest things I have ever seen! And no, we absolutely did not try any.

We went shopping in the tent market and the ropes and tarps kept hitting Brian in the head. I guess they didn't have 6 foot 6 people in mind when they set it up. The nice thing about having Brian to sight see with in Asia is that he's always towering over them and I can pick him out from great distances.

Our final experience at the festival was to let the kids shoot giant bottle rockets over the river. The begged us to do it, but when we actually let them, they didn't like it at all because the smoke blew right back into their faces.

The Korean boys were all hitting on Chloe. I thought it was pretty funny, but she was annoyed. I like that about her. Both my girls are very confident and don't need male attention to know who they are.

On our way home, we started hearing this clanking noise in the engine. It was really late, we don't speak Korean and we were out in the middle of no where. We kept trying to go as far as we could, praying we could make it the last 50 km back to Daegu, but no such luck. Our car died a pitiful death on the side of the busy freeway. Fortunately, here in Korea, your insurance always has roadside assistance tied into your plan. We called roadside assistance and tried to navigate the language difficulties (they spoke some English) to get a tow truck and a taxi to drive out to where we were stuck and get us home. We sat for an hour on the side of the freeway waiting. The kids were hilarious, they kept saying, "This is awesome. This is the best night of our lives!" I realized, they have never been broken down in a car before. That was a regular occurence for Brian and me growing up--but we always buy new cars, so this was a first for them. (Here we bought a clunker van with 200,000 miles and it is not holding up!)

Finally, the tow truck and the taxi arrived. We had an hour taxi drive with six people stuffed into the cab. It cost us $80 for the taxi $90 extra for the tow truck and $1600 for the repair. I guess it will always be a night we remember!