Lotus Lantern Festival

05-23-2010
Day 79 of 365: Last weekend I had a chance to participate in one of East Asia's biggest celebrations, the Lotus Lantern Festival. This festival, which is always on the Sunday before Buddha's birthday, is a time for Buddhist monks and believers in Buddhism to celebrate their religion by going to the temples, offering prayers, and lighting lanterns in remembrance of Buddha. There are over 10 million Buddhists in South Korea, which is roughly 1/4 of the total population. In addition, Buddhism, along with Confucianism, have strong influences throughout East Asian culture. I am a christian, so I was just a looker-on as hundreds of people paid homage and performed various rituals in and around the temple we visited in Seoul. I enjoyed the decorations though.

Buddha's birthday is celebrated differently in every country. In India, people dress all in white and go to the temple. In Sri Lanka, people decorate their houses and streets with special candles and lanterns. And in Nepal, Buddha's birthday is celebrated during the whole month according to the Buddhist calendar. Here in Korea, the temples and surrounding areas were flooded with multicolored, paper lanterns, and there was a night parade in Seoul where thousands of people walked down the avenue with homemade lanterns and ceremonial dress. There were also entirely lit floats of tigers, dragons, peacocks and other animals in the parade, as well as various dancers, performers and musicians. It really was a great show, but the combination of the night and brightly lit, moving objects gave my camera some trouble, so I only got a few really good pictures. I think the fire-breathing dragon at the top of the page came out pretty nicely though.

For dinner that night, my never-ending quest to seek out Mexican food in South Korea (which I'll blog about soon) brought me to a taco and burrito place called Tomatillo. It's basically the equivalent of Chipotle, so I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's Mexican or not. Either way, the food was pretty good, if not a tad overpriced. That's to be expected here though.