five men and a lady: The Lantern Festival

We traveled up to Seoul to see the lantern festival. It's a celebration of Buddhas birthday. Sad to say it was a rainy weekend, but PRAISE GOD, we had checked the weather report before leaving and we were set with all kinds of rain gear.

Even despite the rain, we had a really great weekend. Seoul is an amazing city that we still have a TON to see. We read somewhere that it is the 4th largest city in the world, another report said it was the 5th, either way, it's really stinkin' big!

The funniest part of the whole weekend was realizing that we are celebrities!! They love Americans, but Americans with four children, and four boys to top it all off with, well, all I can say is we might as well have been famous for the amount of pictures taken of us over the weekend. I think there were more pictures taken of US than we took of the parade. The Koreans are so friendly to us too, it's just wonderful. Germany was the opposite, they didn't like kids, ore kids that talked at least, and we got glared at all the time. Here they are staring and smiling and want to come up and touch the kids and teenage girls LOVE to have their picture taken with our boys. The older Korean women come up and just pet our kids heads. It's pretty funny. The boys are pretty good sports about it, which make it nice. It's not like they freak out and start yelling, "STRANGER DANGER!!!" That would probably be because we haven't really taught them to have be afraid of strangers (maybe we should work on that a little bit), but also they are just really easy going kids.

I think this is the only picture taken of me all weekend. It's a little dark, but people start to complain if I don't include a picture of me, so here it is...

The boys just loved riding the metro all over the place. They would have been fine if we just did that. We got more offers of seats from old Korean women, for the kids to sit in. It was crazy.

Doug and the boys in the hotel gardens. They were so pretty, and it wasn't raining!!

These are the lanterns by the big temple in Seoul. Thousands of them, it was so cool, would have been cooler without the rain, and with sun streaming though, but was still cool with the rain.

A sweet Korean woman offered to take this for us, all we had to do was let her take one of us with her camera as well, it's a little funny, but OK.

Doug liked this building behind him, just random that I took his picture in front of it, we were stopped before crossing the street and I had my camera out so I thought I'd take a picture.

All the boys had to hold these and get their picture taken with them. The Koreans were so excited to let them hold them, our kids can do no wrong in their minds.

Old Korean man who sold birds. It was crazy to see him pulling the cart full of birds in cages, just not something I'm used to seeing in the US.

The boys were fascinated and wanted to keep looking at the birds, but the man wasn't stopping.

More sweet Korean ladies, they were giving the boys Buddhist prayer beads! The boys got so much free stuff that night! Then of course we had to take a picture with them! :)