Lighting the Night

Recovering from this weekend doesn't do it.  With the Apple Festival on Saturday, you would think we would take it easy on Sunday right.   Nope.....

We headed to the Seoul Lantern Festival with some friends.  We did some quick research and found out that the festival is in the same part of town as the Blue House.  Since we haven't seen that yet and it was another pretty day in Korea, we hopped a train earlier than the Haugh's and Kaercher's.

This time, we even figured out how to take the rapid train and shaved 30 minutes off of our travel time.  After arriving at the station, we immediately found the location for the lantern festival and went about wandering the neighborhood.  

Chongwadae translates to "The house with blue tiles" and refers to the grounds as well as the building of  the Oval Office of President Lee.  The grounds are beautiful from what I see online, but I want to visit in the spring when the gardens are in bloom.  After walking up and saying, "yep, there's the Blue House," it was time to grab some dinner and meet our friends at the festival.  

The festival is different than the one we went to in the spring.  This one was along a walking path that lined the Cheonggyecheon.  It was crowded, but nice to walk along and enjoy the lanterns.  They had traditional lanterns, different lanterns from all over the world, ones depicting storybook characters, and lanterns celebrating Korean heritage.  What was great was I was able to get some good pictures this time since they weren't moving. 

After about an hour, we had enough of the cold and walking, so we headed to warm up in Holly's Coffee.  Apparantly, Holly has had time to become a coffee mogul here in Korea.  We enjoyed our coffee and treats and decided to hop the train back to Songtan, as it was getting late.