2009 Lantern Festival

Chinese New Year is officially over - the 15th day is reserved as the Lantern Festival. Since it falls on a Monday this year, the celebration was this past Saturday. The famous area is in Pingxi (pronounced PING-shee, or close to that) where thousands of people show up in a small village for the releasing of thousands of lanterns to the heavens.

We traveled by SLOW train (compared to the High Speed Rail) and took about 90 minutes to get to our destination. "We" being my wonderful neighbors Zach/Alisa, as well as Angel (our Taiwanese connection who got us around) and her boyfriend Ryan, then me tagging along as the 5th wheel. The town is just that, a town. But on the one day every year reserved for the Lantern Festival, it erupts full of vendors selling food, souvenirs, and of course paper lanterns. The object is to buy a paper lantern (at around $3 a pop), write your wishes on the outside of it, then you light the paper underneath allowing the warm air inside the lantern to want to go up and up into the sky. It's an amazing thing to watch actually.

I have some pictures to the right - warning though, there are a lot of them! And honestly, the pictures don't really do it justice. It was raining all day, not heavy enough to keep people at home, but enough to have an umbrella (-ella, -ella, -ella) out all day (hey hey hey). During the day, you can see the lanterns with the wishes written on the sides, lifted to the heavens in hopes of getting the wishes granted in the new year. Before you judge this tradition, I think the same thing is done in the US with New Year's Resolutions... you list a "goal" that eventually turns into a "wish" and you let it go to fade away into the sky!!

We did buy a lantern during the day and filled it with wishes - you will have to view the pics to see our wishes. Success for our lantern. About 1% of them burn up, or the fire goes out, or they don't have enough juice to get up in the air but rather fall into the river. Surprisingly, we were rooting for these 1% situations for other people's lanterns (not for ours of course). This is very similar to a NASCAR race where you want a huge accident, but not involving your driver. Ours was successful in joining the windstreams and disappear out of site. All throughout the day there would be lanterns released from the town (they continued through the night actually) and they would fill the sky with wishes.

In the evening, we headed to the mass area where the group releases occur (the famous one) and among the 500 or so tripods, there is an area (I call it the VIP area) where you are escorted when it is your turn, then they give you the color of the round, light together, then release together. It's very well coordinated and they would release about every 15 minutes. With entertainment of different kinds in between. The president of Taiwan was even there! We went about 2 hours into the night events and had our chance to release with everyone else. By then, the rain had stopped, the wind had died, so our lantern went straight up and was visable for quite a long time. At night, the entire sky in each direction was filled with specks of light - amazing.

I put my videos on youtube for you to get a better appreciation of how beautiful it was when they would all be released.