Saturday night, Jill and I went to the Chinese Lantern Festival at Fair Park.
When the sun goes down, the lanterns come to life, as the art illuminates, moves, and takes on an other-worldly life of its own. It's truly a fantasyland of colors, shapes, and cultural discovery.
Small completed pieces and raw materials were shipped by sea to the U.S. west coast, then trucked to Dallas, where a team of more than 40 arrived from China to construct the majority of the exhibits on-site. Brilliant, glowing, artworks comprise 25 stunning displays in a kaleidoscope of color. Like stained glass in 3-D, each lantern set is made of hundreds and thousands of individual pieces.
The entrance of the Chinese Lantern Festival.
We circled the Imperial Dragon Boat by land.
This boat is over 120 feet long.
We strolled by the bamboo forest, populated by playful pandas!
The spires of the towering Porcelain Pagoda reach as high as 53 feet. Inspired by a Buddhist temple in China, this display is composed of an astounding 68,000 pieces of porcelain dishware—plates, bowls, spoons, and cups—all hand-tied using traditional techniques. There were a total of 9 spires.
I was born in 1961 - The Year of the Ox.
2014 is the Year of the Horse
Other displays will include a fanciful castle, all of the characters of the Chinese zodiac, "hallway" of great lanterns, magical mushrooms, ants on vacation, all sorts of flowers, gigantic vases, dinosaurs, flamingos and longhorn steers (FYI - this was a tribute to the local culture).
On our way home, we stopped at Humperdinks in Addison
where we shared an appetizer and burger.
