Festival of Lanterns

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Well, it sounds like from the comments that I was not the only one who was under the weather at the end of last year and the beginning of this one! I am feeling much better, although the fatigue continues.... I hope you all are feeling better as well!

We live very close to Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, so when we found out a Chinese Lantern Festival was there, we knew we wanted to check it out.

Then, we waited until the very last day we could possibly go. =) So the night before I was leaving for my girls' weekend, I raced home from work, dashed around packing and making some food, and then we headed over! We arrived just before the last performance of the night (9pm). The performances were mixed; the dancing was just OK, but there was a face changer and an instrumentalist that were both great!

The lanterns varied widely in terms of both subject matter and size, and it made for a beautiful display. They ranged from "normal" sized hanging lanterns...

...to 20 foot (7 meter) tall "palace lanterns".

I'll save the very largest one for the end of the post. =)

There were a lot of couples taking selfies under the heart arches. :)

I really liked this display, inspired by Chinese porcelain, even though it was outlined in LEDs rather than being a traditional lantern.

The giant ferris wheel is not part of the festival; it's just across the street from the Park and is semi-permanent. To the left, you can see part of the snowflake walk (which was kind of a mish-mash of LED snowflakes and reindeer and Santa Claus lanterns). The only criticism we had about the Festival (well, along with the price!) was that the displays weren't visually separate enough in some cases. I think they would be better displayed in a garden setting where you had trees or bushes to break up the views so the different vignettes didn't compete with each other so much.

I liked these fish.

The sign beside them told me (verbatim!), "The form of each festival is a sedimentation process of the history and culture of a country. ... The pronunciation of fish in Chinese is the same as surplus which means people can have remains in wealth and food for next year."

Which was informative and hilarious. I'm kind of surprised they didn't have a native speaker help with these signs, since the Festival was sponsored by the Hilton Garden Inn and had its logo plastered on each sign.

Of course we had to have a dragon!!

You can see how detailed some of the bigger lanterns were. This dragon was actually as long as his counterpart...

the phoenix!!

Isn't he spectacular?? Both the dragon and phoenix were about 50 feet (16-17 meters) long!! I kind of expected there to be a rooster since the Year of the Rooster is coming up, but this guy was definitely an acceptable substitute. ;)

JiffNotes
I'd tell you to go see the Chinese Festival of Lanterns in Centennial Olympic Park, but of course we procrastinated going to see it so long that we went on the last day.