Lighting up lanterns

A few weeks has passed by since I flew back from my home country back to Russia in order to continue with my studies. With the passing of time, my will of studying hard and changing over a new leaf has also been dying down. Though, because I'm in the education committee for the Malaysian Student Associations, the responsibilities there has kind of forced me into doing a bit of studying. And with more time, I think the momentum will grow and the small bud will grow into a large tree.

Other than being lazy on my studies, the rest during summer has also deterred me from going to the gym for my workout sessions. In compensation, the badminton outings with my friends in Malaysia has made me regain my interest in badminton once again and with that my weekends has been filled up with sport activities for an astounding 4-6 hours on these days.

As you may have known if you follow my Facebook, in conjunction of my town's 980th Birthday, they had a lantern lighting up festival(放孔明灯）. It was the first time I had ever been able to see this up close and also got a chance to actually light one up and make a wish.

The event was planned to start at 9pm and hence we had a couple of friends come over to my house for dinner. From there on, we went to the event together. As we had quite a heavy dinner, we decided to have a walk there instead of taking public transport.

While walking there, one of our friend who went ahead to help us get the lantern called us and said that the people were already starting to light them up and asked us to quicken our footsteps. We were still about 5 minutes walk away from the point of gathering when she called.

All of a sudden, from the far side, we could see small colorful lights starting to float up the sky, lighting up the dark night skyline. The sight was just amazing to look at. With that, we hasten and willed ourselves to reach the area as quick as possible.

Though we only realize the amount of people that had gather when we began to approach the gathering point, the place was so crowded with people that I ended up my two friends that I was walking with.

When we finally meet up with our other friends, most of the by standers had already light up their lantern and there were only a few people left that were trying to light theirs up.

In order to gather up some other friends of ours, one of my friend started to wave with the lanterns on her hands, that attracted a whole herd of locals to us asking how much is the lantern for and where can they buy it.

At last, when everyone was gathered we tore out the lanterns from its plastic and prepared ourselves to let them loose.

Seeing them fly up the sky and crossing our fingers in hope that it will float up steadily and that hopefully our respective wishes will come true!!