Wow. I feel like I'm getting a little behind in my usual weekly updates of Korealife. Time is sort of starting to blur things that I actually do together. So I'll try to briefly update you...it's gotta be brief, I'm working currently.

Anyway, last weekend we went to Insadong for Budda's Birthday Bash...er...Festival. The week before Buddha's actual birthday there is a huge cultural festival with dances, displays and demonstrations, as well as a huge lantern parade. We stopped by after church on Sunday and had a great time. It was really cool to see the lanterns in the parade. Unlike typical North American parades, this one took place in the evening, after dark, so that the lanterns were clearly visable.

At the beginning of the parade we realized that there were masses of people who we couldn't really see over top of in order to see the parade. We saw a small kiosk, a little stand near subway stations that usually sells gum, newspapers and cigarettes, that sorta thing. Being that we coudln't see 'n all, we hoisted ourselves (all five of us) on top of the kiosk, which by the way was made of some sort of shoddy metal. I was definitely thinking that we were going to either fall through, or tip the kiosk crushing hundreds of Koreans. I am happy to report that neither of those happened and we were able to enjoy the parade from what seemed to be the best seats in the house. We have some great pictures too. I"m pretty sure that we also got our picture taken by a couple of newspaper photographers who saw the white people climbing on stuff. I don't think we offended people by doing it though. Old Korean women were passing us up lit lanterns and candles so that we could hold them high. Kids in the parade would look up, see us, and yell "Hello!" from the parade. I"m still not sure who the main attraction was, the Lantern Parade, or the monkey-like white people scaling kiosks for a good seat.
Oh well, it was all in good fun.