The Fire Festival

A week of unrelenting winter passed. We had taken what remained of our vacation time for the winter semester, and had the next week off from work, a respite we desperately needed to recover and mostly used to sleep, sleep, and sleep some more. The camp had taken a huge toll on us; we had both caught awful colds and lost our voices. I had actually lost vision in my right eye on the last night of the camp- an electric fuzz rainbow, the kind you get after staring at a light bulb for too long, had spread in from the periphery of my vision until my entire right eye was sightless. I was fairly horrified, until it returned a full 20 minutes later. Needless to say, I was more than a little glad for a week off to recuperate.

Very little of note happened that week, which was just the way I hoped it would be. At a school dinner that Wednesday, I found out that both of my co-teachers were leaving, and I would have to learn to work with two new teachers starting the next week. You see, one of the more asinine aspects of the Korean education system is that teachers are relocated every three years or so to a different school (and usually a different grade level), whether they like it or not. In Jeju, this means they can be moved anywhere on the island, even to the town on the opposite side of the island- an hour or more commute in the morning. To make matters worse, they are informed of their relocation around a month before hand, then learn of the actual location about two weeks before classes start, and finally are told only 3 days prior to the first day of school which grade they will be teaching, and are then expected to spend their last weekend drawing up their lesson plans for the entire year. As far as I can tell, or have heard, this is a completely arbitrary process that could easily be done earlier, but is conducted as such to uphold "tradition". The staggering stagnancy that this culture at times displays is unbelievable.

Anyway- soon enough, the day of the Fire Festival was upon us. I had been loading up on a whole slew of pills, trying to get over my cold in time for whatever weather that Saturday could throw at us. As it turned out, it was the warmest day in several months, a beautiful clear day that seemed separated by several months of thawing from the previous Saturday. The stalls and stalls of pork vendors had vanished, along with the warzone clutter of the previous week's dozens of collapsed tents. Ultimately, it made for a more attractive scene, more natural and less white plastic flappings.

This weather made our early arrival at 3:30 pm much less of a mistake than the week before. After several hours of hanging out and meeting friends (and almost getting set on fire by an incompetent festival lackey who knocked a flaming log onto my backpack from the top of a stone tower), the sun began to set. Small campfires sprung up about the grounds, and men began to pass out little homemade constructs made with a long wire handle, attached to a tin can with holes punched in it, filled with tissue paper. When lit on fire and rapidly spun on the wire handle, they looked like this:


The entire hillside we were on was covered in glowing orange arcs, the majority made by children. Little children... spinning cans of fire in a crowd. It's nice to be in a place that's not overly concerned with safety sometimes, though we did have a few near misses (most of which were our own fault).

Light My Fire


The last of the evenings light was draining out of the sky when a procession of three little girls carrying torches began to cut through the crowd. They came from the very back of the festival grounds through swelling crowds (I had to chase after them 4 times to get a good picture without people getting in the way), then skirted the edge of the mountain and disappeared into the crowd. A minute or so later, accompanied by loud chanting and cheering and an unending, pulsing drumbeat, a small patch of flame arose in the heart of the crowd, as the first three torches sparked a dozen more. It spread from person to person, one gasoline-soaked bamboo pole to the next, until a massive faction had formed, and began marching like an angry mob toward the hill.







Once they were all aligned along the base of the mountain, each bundled bale with a small crowd around it, the firework display began.

(I suppose that song from the Requiem For A Dream is utterly ubiquitous now, if it's even being used in South Korea folk festivals)

Post-Fireworks Corona


The crown of the hill had an eerie red glow as the crest of the hill caught fire. There was very little time for anyone to appreciate this before a hoarse-voiced Korean man started screaming out a countdown, and the looming hordes descended on the hill. It went up in flames immediately.


[I was apparently too high up on the hill, and could have been blown up by the charges. Notice how I'm getting shoved down the hill while recording this. Oops...]


Great Balls of Fire! The Wish-Ball Burns...


The smaller bales of straw


Oreum ablaze.




Firefighters


This is a full 20 minutes after the fire was lit:


The fire went on for roughly 30 minutes without diminishing greatly in size, and in fact was still going fairly strong when we left after forty minutes. Following the ignition of the hill, there was another fireworks display. It was one of my favorite things about the festival; because of the immense heat, and the resulting waves of distortion flowing out from it, the fireworks looked like they were underwater, blurred and dancing through the heat. We sat down near the foot of the blaze and looked up into the stars. It was stunning.

The fire festival had lived up to its reputation, and merited the return visit. I wish that the massive crowd of hundreds of thousands had been present like in years prior, but there was something special about the intimacy of a small scale, mostly-Jeju residents kind of event. I was interviewed again for TV (#7) on the way out, and got to share my inebriated enthusiasm. It definitely was a high point of my time here so far.


(see if you can read my hat)