Seoul Horse Races & Lantern Festival

Yesterday we had the opportunity to experience our first real-life horse races. I had been to harness racing at the county fair before, but never anything quite like this. We took the train into Seoul to meet up with some friends from church at the races, which run every Saturday from about 11am-6pm. It felt a little bit like a scene from a movie, so many men watching the scoreboards, placing bets, and smoking. Lots and lots of smoking. You can place many different kinds of bets (anything from betting one horse will place to picking the top three horses in order). They also take bets as low as 100₩ (or about 10 cents), so we enjoyed the atmosphere a bit and only lost about 4 bucks. :)


This is one of the many guards standing along the fence at ground level. We spent most of our time on the fourth floor, but I forgot my iPod had a camera until the end. Whoops! In the background you can see the huge screen where they show the horses starting each race.


This is a shot of the finish line. If you can see the arch-like horseshoe, the cameras are in lines just to the left of it. I don't have any pictures of real horses for you all. We were too busy cheering them on to take pictures. (Don't worry, no outbursts a la "My Fair Lady" were heard...)


Now for the lantern festival. I'm not sure if it's an annual event or something special in time for the G20 Summit, but they had all kinds of lanterns in the Cheonggye Stream in Seoul. We were hungry after a day at the races, so we went to Bennigan's for a change of pace. After being quoted what we thought was 15 minutes, we double-checked with the host only to be told she had said 50 minutes. Ah, misunderstandings. At any rate, we eventually ate a delicious dinner. I had a cheesy mushroom steak with mashed potatoes. First time I have had mashed potatoes here. Quite a pleasant treat. Brandon had a southwest sampler, including quesadillas and carrots/celery with southwest ranch. (Ranch of any kind is quite the rarity here, so I thoroughly enjoyed helping him with his food.)

Now for the experience of the festival itself. As you probably know, Korea is a relatively small country (about the size of Indiana) with a lot of people (about 48 million) living in it. Combine that with a popular event and the Korean way of finding your way through a crowd and you get an interesting experience. As far as we know, Koreans' rarely use any sort of "excuse me" expression to ask people to move. When a subway stop comes, many people stand right next to the doors, waiting for them to open. Then they just push their way out. If someone wants to get by you in a small area, they simply squeeze their way through. At the festival this practice was extreme.


We waited for over an hour (much of it in the wrong line) to get down to the stream level. The two strings of lanterns in the top left shows street level, and there are limited access points to the stream. While we were in line, people were almost constant shoving their way through our line to get to the other side. The boldness is pretty impressive sometimes. Brandon and I started standing quite close to the people in front of us (something generally done here it seems) to cut off the paths of the squeezers because once one person got through, 10-20 more followed. Our efforts did little to decrease the cross-flow of people through our line. Oh, well. On to the lanterns...



They had lanterns depicting all kinds of topics, ranging from animals with their babies, to world famous monuments (Statue of Liberty, Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc.). We ran out of time and had to go catch the last train before we saw everything! I liked this shot because I like cats, and I like silhouettes. Enough said.



Even though it's kind of creepy, I loved the colors in this one!



The dragons turned out to be my favorite because of the colors and the clear shot of the colorful strings of lanterns behind them. I really enjoyed seeing all of the lanterns at night, even if we were pushing and shoving most of the time to stay out of the stream. :) Highly recommend it.

Deanna