Taiwan Travel Diary #5: Taipei Lantern Festival

Hey everyone~

finally had the time to sit down and write about the rest of last saturday. It's already been a week, I'm so sorry 

Anyways, after we finished  walking around the flower festival on Yangminshan we took the bus to Shilin Station to grab something to eat and walk around, as we still wanted to go to the Taipei lantern festival afterwards. It wouldn't make much sense to go while it was still bright outside, so we had to find something to do until then. 

We spent some time at Dante coffee, where dumb me bought an iced coffee again even though it was pretty cold outside. Whoops.

After our coffee break we walked around Shilin nightmarket for a bit. It was super crowded but they have so much delicious food there!

Like yummy takoyaki.

We also saw this place, where you could pay a small amount to try and catch some shrimp (they would cook them afterwards for you). It seemed to be really difficult, as the shrimp were a bit heavy and the fishing hook is only lightly attached to the string.

One of the japanese girls had almost caught one, but it fell down again.

It had already become dark while we were walking around, so we quickly headed over to see the lantern festival.

It was a lot bigger, and a lot more crowded than we had expected.

The first lantern you saw was this huge sheep, as it is the year of the sheep now.

There was a pretty cool rockband playing on the stage in front of the sheep. Found out later that their name is:

                                 化學猴子

After we listened to them for a while we started walking around and looking at the pretty lantern figures. It was really difficult to take photos because it was really, really crowded. And you always had to look down while walking because some (dumb) people actually brought their dogs with them (which i'd actually consider as animal abuse, that was no place for a dog) or little kids whose parents just let them run around freely and didn't look after them.

They had different spaces for different kinds of lanterns. The first few we saw were constructed after poems, which were  written on small signs next to  them.

A blurry picture to give you an idea of how crowded it really was.

They had a few bear lanterns which I found really adorable. Apparantly they were showing the Avengers, or as the sign said "The Animangers"

Hawkeye panda

The hulk bear

Captain Ambearica

And a huge transformer in the middle of the bears?

Iron Bear

Thor

And for some reason, Wolverine.

The creator might actually has never seen the Avengers?

A few street performers also used this opportunity to show some of their skills, as they were so many people around. One guy did a performance with a glowing Yoyo (Yoyos are strangely popular here in Taiwan)

There was a part of the festival focusing on Circus themed animals:

And a part showing lanterns made by (or just sponsored by?) different universities. 

Taipei 101~

Taipei 101 was used pretty often

And our favourite~ since it is the year of the sheep, many lanterns used sheep too.

One university did a remake of One Pieces flying Lamb...with all the characters as sheep!

All the lanterns looked pretty professional, except for those:

They were still adorable nonetheless.

So that's it so far. This post is way too long already~ 

I hope you enjoyed my photospam. Which of these lanterns did you like the best?

Please tell me in the comments below :D

Love,

Lydia

(all cute emoticons are property of littlemisspaintbrush)