Spotted in Seoul
After I took the main photo above at the Olympic Park, all the group realised what I was doing and waved frantically at me. This serves as a great memory of how amiable the Seoul people are. We seemed to have landed here on a morning when it was teeming with school groups so it's the most noise we've heard from an amazingly polite society,
This is wonderful legacy of Seoul '88 but by contrast, Korea also remembers the fallen at a vast war museum (complete with a separate Wedding Hall , available to hire) with many impressive memorials and we didn't even get to inside as it was closed that day.
I had noted that the Lantern Festival was on in Seoul through a little check of the government website beforehand. What I hadn't anticipated was how big it was and that is was on our doorstep. Having realised we didn't have to travel to see the lanterns as they were in every main street as explored the Jongo-gu neighbourhood.
In fact, the photo of the roof of the lantern display at the temple was taken from the hotel room. Celebrating Buddha's birthday, people travelled and wrote out their wish which was them allocated to a lantern. Apart from the sheer joy of the festival, the Sunday parade (good timing as Saturday was the one big rainy day of the week) bought a market to our street where Buddhist people also had stands representing their nation.
The best thing though was seeing young people happily dressing in various traditional outfits. They hire them from hanbok shops all over the city and I observed the same when visiting other special places such as palaces and Olympic Village too.
It sure is not a sight I see every day.
