Pingxi Lantern Festival

For a lot of Asian girls (at least for me)... The scene from Rapunzel, her on a boat with her prince charming seeing lanterns shoot up in the sky, is something you want to put on your Instagram feed one day. But real talk, thousands of people around the world visits this festival to unleash their wishes they have for the Lunar New Year.(https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/taiwan-pingxi-lanterns/index.html) If you love traveling, it's definitely a destination you want to consider. My best friend and I so happened to stumbled upon an upcoming lantern festival happening in Taiwan on February 19th so we decided to just do it. The experience was amazing and beautiful so here's a little memo for y'all. 

ピンシー（平渓）ランタンフェスに行ってきたので、フェスに至るまでの体験をシェアするまる〜〜

Decide on a tour/ツアーは絶対に申し込んだほうがベター

The reason why you should decide to sign up on a tour is because in order to get a spot to actually write something on the lantern, you will need to get a spot for yourself. To do that, you need a ticket in advance that the festival hands out. However, apparently the tickets go out instantly and you can't get them online, you will need to queue in a line from the morning (I guess like at 10:00am or something) the day of the festival. This time we seriously only had one full day, so we didn't want to waist our time so we needed to find a tour that did everything for us. While we were looking, there were a lot of tours but we were mainly looking at Japanese tours and found that a lot of them are pretty expensive. Average was about ¥13,000/per person. We ended up finding a tour that only cost ¥4000/per person by Klook, which seems to be a popular one. BUT, since we haven't been on the others before, I wouldn't know, but maybe because it's cheap...You get what you get? lol I'll explain.
一人で勝手に行っても全然いけるんだろうけど、正直激混みなので結構カオス。台北市内から離れてるから公共の電車使ってると慣れてないし時間かかるし疲れるから、一気にバスに乗り込んじゃってランタンを打ち上げるスポットを事前に取ってくれるツアーに参加したほうが全体的なストレスは減ると思う。笑

※the website is not available anymore but they have reasonable tours. 

https://www.klook.com/en-US/activity/12583-2019-pingxi-sky-lantern-festival-tour-taipei/

2pm-9:30pm was the whole tour time/ざっくり10時間はかかってる笑

We all had to be at a certain place, I believe it was in front of the main Taipei station at 2pm. Once we got there, we thought this tour will be like a one bus capacity with like 30 people or so. NOPE. LOL Once we got to the meeting point, there were roughly about 200 people? lol who are in line for each language tour. Mainly, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Each of the line will take you to the tour buses but I guess they had like 50 buses or more in stand by, and one bus(group)was about 40 people. Mind you, to have 200 people at one place speaking 1000 languages and trying to figure out if everyone is there on time,  just being present there is stressful, so that made us nervous for the rest of the tour. lol 

Once you drive for a good 1hour 30min away from Taipei city to Shifen (十份老街), they will give you 3 hours or so to wonder around the old town of Pingxi before sundown. You head over to where the lanterns are being set up at around 6:30 pm and OMG. lol There are SO SO many people there. Our tour guide told us that our slot is from 8:30 pm so we literally had to wait around doing basically nothing for 3 hours... this was really tiring and dreadful to be honest. We had no idea we had to wait for that long once we were there. The tour did not definitely mention that. Although, you are waiting in front of the actual spot the lanterns are launched so you see a bunch of lanterns at least while waiting so that's nice I guess.

There are a lot of food stands to eat and walk around so you won't get bored! 

After waiting for 3 hours+.... we were finally able to get to our spot and write down some things on our lantern. HOWEVER, it all happens in SECONDS so you really need to have your camera and phone on stand by. There are a couple of volunteer kids that will set up your lantern and you share one lantern with about 4 people. ランタンは意外と大きいので、４人でシェア。

Write down quickly as possible!!! lol You only have like 5 minutes or so before they tell you to put it up.

The couple totally thought we wanted a photo with them yeah???? LOL

Literally, waited for about 3 hours or more, the whole entire lantern experience was like 10 minutes top. It's worth it because it's seriously beautiful when you see thousands of lanterns being launched at once right beneath you, but damn the wait is a fight with your mental brain. lol
まじで相当待たされた割には、ランタンを打ち上げるプロセス自体は10分以内で終了。笑　まあ、、、ディズニーとかタピオカとかで待つのが好きな日本人にとっては・・まあ、苦ではないかもね。笑

But hey, if you want to wish some good luck and eat some good food along the way, why not go?? Worth the travel!
 (also, small note. for environmental reasons, they actually regulate the numbers of lanterns that flies into the sky so that's ethical yeah?)
ちょっとメモ。環境汚染にならない範囲で、ランタンの打ち上げ個数はきちんと規制しているよう。だから、毎年ロット制というか、整理券的なもので行ける人数が決まっているらしいよ。（聞いた話）

健康第一♡