Lantern Festival in Shifen

2013/02/24

It is already 3 years from the time I went to Shifen for my first (and till that moment only one) Lantern Festival. I remember it quite well, as it was the first real trip out of Taipei when I was the exchange student here at NTUST. I went there with my friends. Some of them were already preparing to go back to the Czech Republic and therefore it was one of the few chances to meet them (in Taiwan). It was a great day and for a total newcomer to Taiwan a surprising cross-cultural encounter.

We were planning to go there with several other Czechs. Despite they seemed to be in a hurry and want to be there soon enough, our official meeting at 3pm was unofficially postponed to 3:48, as the girls were delayed :P.

Later on I realized there were much more people going than I had expected. In the end our group was a mixture of Czech, Australian, Russian, Taiwanese, Romanian and who knows who else (sorry guys if I forgot to mention your nationality :-) ).

We caught a bus and headed to Shifen. Opposite to our expectation, the bus was not crowded at all. It was due to the fact everybody has to be seated and Taiwanese buses (as you probably know) don't operate buses with million tiny seats, but huge, comfortable seats that amount can be (on the other hand) counted on fingers of two hands - such a waste of capacity :-).

It took about 50 minutes to reach Shifen from Taipei ZOO and the price was also very reasonable (50 NT$ = 30 CZK for two-way ticket). In comparison with the never-ending torment that used to be the Pingxi special train, this was a pleasant surprise. Only a memory for the endless crowd trying to get somehow into the train is making me hashes, even 3 years after.

We started the evening with stroll through the streets of Shifen, overcrowded by other people who came here to see the lanterns. We tried several local specialties including quail eggs, fried squids, squidballs, onion cakes and some girls even tried the chocolate penis-cake (yak). For some of them it was the first real encounter with local culture, so they just needed to try it :P

The old train station is a very nice place to stay when there is not a billion people around, but in this moment it was worse then the low-class bus to New Dehli. On the other hand the area was more free than the narrow streets of old Shifen. Lanterns were reaching the sky every second there, but there was not much of them in fact (in comparison with release 3 years ago). We bought our own lantern, wrote our messages on it and I was almost expecting to release it, when somebody yelled "it already started, hurry up" and we were suddenly running to God-knows-where.

Crossing the whole old-town we reached some more opened area and I saw what they had in mind. A bunch of lanterns (about 500 I guess) was released in one moment from somewhere behind the rooftops, from the same direction we were running to. We planned to release our lantern there, so our will the one of the next round 500! But our excitement didn't last for long, as an officer turned us back with "no own lanterns allowed".

We went to a small yard beside the street and decided to release it, so we will be allowed to see the lantern thing. Everything was set and we just wanted to release our lantern. Nobody knows why, but the lantern didn’t go slowly up to the sky, but fly away with top speed heading left, close to the ground, just by accident missing the near tree standing in its path and proceeding onward to find its destiny probably several hundred meters further. My personal wish I wrote on the lantern never happened and "I suspect this was the real reason" :-). Even our second lantern released by second part of our group didn't succeed, despite I don't think we would make a flaw in the releasing process :-)

Without lanterns, we were allowed to the access the main releasing area. When crossing the bridge we saw that another mass release shall be in few minutes. We hurried there for not much avail :-( I didn't want to return without at least one good shot, so I started to push through the crowd closer to the releasing area. Others soon joined me and we almost reached the very front, but it was completely impossible to see anything and it wasn't particularly so great to be devoured by the crowd like this, thus we gave up and left the crowd to almost same position as we were before.

Surprisingly, just a slight change of position meant a big difference in viewing conditions and there I have made my 1 good shot. Unfortunately it was literally ONE shot, because the battery didn't hold any longer and the reserve battery was charged out.

Nevertheless, the most interesting event happened just after this occurred. We almost wanted to leave, when a Taiwanese couple asked one of our group members whether we wanna use the tickets for lantern release (probably they didn't want to wait next one hour). Of course we DID want it, so thanks to them we had the great opportunity to release a lantern with hundreds of others in one moment and be a real part of it! As I was later informed, this happens quite often and if you are lucky, your chance to get into the lantern release this way is quite high. (You can definitely imagine how desperately I had to be tearing hair off my head for discharged batteries in my camera :-/ )

After participation in the release there was nothing more compelling to do and therefore we decided to go home. Nobody probably expected a queue for bus through all the village for standing tickets. Well, that is the main drawback of the Lantern Festival in Shifen, but still, its worthy going.

2013/02/24 - Lantern Festival in Shifen [15 pictures]

Pingxi District
Lantern Festival
Sky Lanterns

Lantern Festival in Shifen Phorum [0 posts]
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