Monday, February 23, 2009

Kunming - Part 2 - Light Festival


Today's addition to my Kunming adventure comes the night of the Chinese New Year (Jan. 26th) and takes place in Kunming's park/carnival. On new year's day, we spent most of the day visiting relatives and non-stop eating. That evening we went to Kunming's famous lantern-style light festival. For only 30元/person it was pretty nice. They constructed a collection of scenes and characters depicting famous Chinese historical icons...in lantern style. There was everything from old style lanterns to Dragons and even Ultra Man made. Now, these weren't the traditional lanterns with a candle or oil burning wicks inside, they were definitely lit with modern light bulbs. Due to China's energy problems, it was advertised that this year, all of the light bulbs were changed to halogen to help with the environment. The show was quite long, it lead all they way until the ride section of the park(maybe a 3km or so). When Even though by that time is was around 10pm, the midway and rides were open. It was quite busy that night as people probably had the same idea as us to take a break from the family. We played a couple money-stealing games and rode one ride before calling it a night and walking back through the lanterns enjoying them one more time.


Check out my flickr site for more pics!

1 comment:

Josh Katz said...

Yo sax master, sweet vacation! I've always wanted to check out those cities.. you should definitely see Xinjiang if you get a chance too. Let's swap itineraries for this summer. How'd you like that Lao Wai gig by the way? The two times I played I literally scattered the entire crowd. I guess the Charlie Parker licks were pretty terrifying.

I started a new blog by the way.. not sure how you're Chinese is coming but this one is written entirely in pu tong hua.

http://jiashimao.blogspot.com/

By the way, how many hits do you have?? Do I get to count hits from both sites for my grand total?