Jinju lantern festival

We took a weekend trip to another city about two hours away, called Jinju.  We went to see the Lantern festival there.  Jinju is a city along a river with a large fortress from the 1500s, which was invaded by Japanese in that century.  The first time the Japanese invaded, the Koreans were able to hold them off by putting hundreds of lanterns on boats and tricking the Japanese into thinking that there was a larger Korean army than there really was.  However, a year later, the Japanese returned with thousands of more soldiers and ended up massacring thousands of Koreans and occupying the city.  So, every year Jinju has a lantern festival to remember both battles.  There are hundreds of lanterns that are modeled after all kinds of animals, famous people, and characters from movies or books.  There are lanterns depicting everyday Koreans during the 1500s, and there are lanterns of soldiers and fortresses.  It was really amazing!!!

We got to write wishes on lanterns which we later lit and had them float down the river . . .

My wish

Haha!

Us with our wishes on the river

There they go!

All kinds of lanterns, this one is a fortress you can walk through!

The building and walls on the top of the hill is the Jinju fortress

There were temporary bridges you could walk across to get closer to the lanterns

View from the fortress

Unfortunately, I don't think our wishes will come true, as they bagged them and threw them away at the end of the night!  

Even the trash cans were turned into lanterns!