part 2 - the street festival

Today I will show you some of the booths set up at the day festival. There were probably 50 booths set up at the festival - most were different buddhist groups in the area. I got several pamphlets for English speaking temples and classes handed to me (how did they know I speak English?)

All kidding aside, there were a lot of neat goings on during the lotus flower festival. Please ask any questions you may have, I will try to answer them. One question I had in my head was "I saw the lotus flowers in July, so why the Lotus Flower Festival in May? There are no lotus flowers, things are barely green!" Well, that is because Buddha is represented by the Lotus Flower for several reasons... 1. the lotus flower grows out of the mud, yet it is not sullied by the muck it grows in 2. according to buddhism there is a lot of suffering in our lives and we can grow above it, like the flower 3. tradition has it that his mother had a dream of a white elephant with lotus flowers on it's tusks when she was pregnant.

Okay, The first picture I have is of some lanterns outside a building. I do not know what this building is, it is not the main temple. I actually did not take pictures of the main temple because it was so crowded... (and I have pictures of it from last winter). This building has a lot of lanterns that have prayers attached.


This next picture is a close-up of some lanterns that were strung along the streets. You can notice some of the lanterns are in the shape of Lotus Flowers.


There were a lot of arts and crafts going on. These people were smashing azaleas into cloth with spoons. You can do this to any kind of muslin cloth and it should stay even through washings. I heard about people doing this with pansies in the US. I would like to try it one day when I have some time and want to annoy whoever lives near me. (taptaptaptap).

Not only were there crafts, but dances as well. Here is a group of women dancers.

Here is a clothes tent, besides the fact i thought the name was kind of funny (who wants difficult Korean clothes?) you can see the clothes on the right are orange. This is a very traditional cloth dye made from persimmons. We saw a lot of that on Jejudo last year.


And Lastly, people always have the image of the secluded temple on a mountain somewhere (and there are plenty of those here in Korea) but really they are hip and with it...