Fire? and Alcohol? That sounds like a good combination to me!

My Visit to the 2010 Jeju Fire Festival

Once again I haven't been posting as often. I apologize but I wasn't sure people wanted to hear my tales of woe about my demonic computer or how much I've enjoyed playing Aion. And truthfully, that would be a good summary of the last few weeks of my life. However this weekend, finally after so many weeks, I got off my butt and headed out to Jeju's largest festival!

The festival runs for 3 days and celebrates the years first Full Moon (based off the Lunar Calendar). Since Jeju is an old extinct volcano, they celebrate by embracing fire and imitating the power of the volcano through fire and fireworks. This festival is also connected to the old tradition of burning fields to prepare the soil for planting. This is Jeju's largest festival and tends to bring in people from all over Korea.

I only went to the last day of the festival because that is when they burn the entire oreum. And the fact that it rained all weekend was also a bit of a deterent.

Most of the activities had been done on the previous days, so there wasn't much to see before fire. There were TONS of food stands and a lot of free alcohol lying around. So it would be fairly safe to say that the majority of the Koreans there were definitely buzzed. That's not to say that the foreigners weren't, but you didn't need to guess if they were drunk or not.


My friend and I did the same tradition as the last festival, which is writing down our wishes for the new year on a piece of paper, and hanging up it up on some rope. Except at this festival, my wish was burned up with the rest of the haystack it was attached to.


One other thing they did have was kite flying! Now that may sound a little dull, but they had the the largest kites I have ever seen! Not to mention a giant flying Spongebob! And if that wasn't incredible (or random) enough, they later on had kites with flashing LED lights!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj5p3jlckYo

[I couldn't get the entire video uploaded here. So here's a link instead]

Finally there was the procession of the torches to the base of the oreum and they stood with torches in hand while the entire mountain side blew up with fireworks. And after a brief wait the entire place was set on fire! You can't really understand how amazing this was with just words or photos, so I've uploaded a video (ignore my dorky voice in the background)! It truly was an amazing spectacle...

Afterwards we were able to get up close to the fire and ... well basically screw about. The police didn't seem to mind, but then it's not as though anyone did anything stupid. And that was about it. It really was an amazing night!