Lotus Lantern Festival

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Last weekend there was a Lotus Lantern Festival. I uploaded pictures on picasa of that...it was pretty and there were just a TON of people. The parade on Sunday lasted about 2.5 hours!

This weekend, Ronald and I took the KTX train from Seoul Station to Busan. We spent Friday there in Busan. The first thing we did was find a jimjilbang (like Dragon Hill Spa I talked about earlier...a bath house of sorts) and take a nap. We'd stayed up all night to wait for the train. So we slept and then wandered around a bit and found the beach and then we went to Beomesa Temple. You just take the metro to the stop and when you come out, it directs you to where the buses take you up to the temple. So it was very easy getting to and from there.

This was Buddha's 2554th birthday, so the temple was open 24 hours. When we got there, they were putting on a show and all the lanterns were hung. When it got dark, they lit all the lanterns. Very pretty. What was also cool was that there was a natural spring fountain they drank from...I will put up pictures of this, but we also saw this at the Seokguram Temple. But I'm getting ahead of myself...we stayed to watch the show and people kept adding little bookmark looking things to the lanterns -- each lantern had one and I assume it was some type of prayer.

After the show was over, we headed back down and they started some little fireworks. The line to wait for the bus was HUGE. The bus we did get on got stuck going down because a car was parked badly. What ended up happening was that some men came and they lifted the car and moved it a little bit towards the curb so the bus could squeeze by. After this we went to bed.

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