Auckland’s Lantern Festival is a traditional Chinese festival that is extremely popular. For many years, the festival has been held next to Auckland Hospital in a park called the Auckland Domain. The festival, lasting several days, regularly attracted over a hundred thousand visitors. This caused traffic problems for the hospital.
So this year, organisers moved the festival to the Auckland waterfront to make life easier for the hospital. But this is not the only change. To keep social distancing, and also to trace contacts, people need a ticket to get into the festival. You can get tickets for free online, and the tickets only last three hours. Time is limited to three hours so that everybody can have a chance to see the festival. At any time, there will be a limit of 11,000 people looking at the lanterns.
But that is not the only change! Because we recently went to Alert Level 2, the festival has been postponed by one week to the first week of March.
If you go to the festival, you can see over 500 lanterns, see some live entertainment and buy fun things (including food) from the stalls.
Here are the details of how to get to the festival:
When: 4-7 March, 2021
Where: Captain Cook Wharf. To get there, you need to walk down Queen’s Wharf, near the ferry terminal.
Ticket times: You can book tickets for 5pm, 6:30pm or 8:30pm. Each ticket lasts for three hours.
How to get tickets: go to https://www.moshtix.co.nz/v2/event/auckland-lantern-festival-2021-all-dates/125696
vocabulary:
attract: make someone want to come
Wharf: a wooden platform that goes out over the water
organisers: people who make an event (such as a festival or a party) happen
waterfront: an area of land that is close to the sea. This can include beaches or wharfs.
trace contacts: follow a person’s past movements to find out who they may have passed on a virus to.
last: continue, endure
postponed: rescheduled for a later date; made later
stalls: small, temporary shops for special events
Comprehension Questions:
- Why is the festival being held in a different place this year?
- Why is the event ticketed?
- When is the event being held?
- Where is the event being held?