South Korea Lantern Festival

The Daegu Lantern festival is one thing I would not pass up if I had the opportunity to go. I did not know what to expect of it honestly, I had just found out about it a couple of days before hand. We just moved into a new apartment with a beautiful view of the E-World 83 Tower in downtown Daegu, and a friend mentioned that we would be able to see the festival from here!

I tried to find information about it online, and the official website was of course not in English, so I relied on blogs. They were quite helpful, but didn't tell all the details and some things were different about this year than the last based off my experience and what I read of others.

Every year they have 2 dates in which they sell a limited amount of tickets online. These sell out within 2 minutes so they are quite difficult to get. No worries - they sell more the day of the event. The day of the festival they sell 6,000 tickets on a first come first serve basis starting at 11:00 am. In previous years, these tickets were FREE. Since I got all of my information from previous years blogs, I was confident they were free, so confident I didn't bring any Won.

We arrived to Duryu Park at 10:15 and I expected people to be camped out to make sure they didn't miss their ticket, but it was nothing like that. There was about 100-200 people in line when we got there and more slowly trickling in. I had to make a trip to the ATM after I discovered it was not free, while Roman waited in line to hold our spot. It was only 10,000 won for 2 tickets in the blue section (the outer section). We got our tickets at 12:00 and headed home to wait until it started at 6pm.

Our wristbands for the blue section.

When we got back to Duryu Park, it was packed with people. We had some friends buy their tickets at 4:00 pm and they still weren't sold out, then another pair try at 6:00 pm and they had sold out, and there was no parking. We took the bus so there were no worries about parking for us.

Inside the baseball stadium in Duryu Park!

Although the starting time is at 6:00 pm I would not advise anyone to show up that early. They had guest speakers, singers and prayer for 2.5 hours. This festival is to celebrate Buddhas’ birthday so it does make sense that they had this whole show before they get to the lanters. We did not expect it to be that long. However if you show up later, you may not get a good seat, or a seat at all. Only the middle sections have chairs, but the blue section is grass on ledges, you just find a place and sit. Most people brought a mat to sit on.

The peak of the festival

Finally at about 8:30 pm, everyone from the middle pulled out their lanterns, they dimmed the lights, and let them go. I will just let the picture speak for itself.

Roman and I

As we left, we were stopped by a firework show, which then kicked off the beginning of the parade! You can’t miss it, just follow the crowd.