I Heart You Dave!

Everyone seems to think it's creepy that I keep a photo of you in a locket and wear it close to my heart. They just don't understand my love. ㅠㅠ <3

Haeinsa Temple Stay

Last Friday, Jon, Becky and I took a late-night bus down to Daegu to go on a Temple Stay at Haeinsa Temple. 

After our arrival, we went love motel scouting and stumbled upon the Shangrila Love Motel. It was wonderfully kitschy and served our needs pretty well. 

The next morning, we got up early and hopped on a bus toward Haeinsa. The ride took an hour and a half and was on super windy roads, so I ended up feeling a bit ill from trying to read.

The hike up to the mountain was very pretty and crowded with the Koreans in their hiking gear.

Smoky the Bear says, "Don't start the 산불."

It was a lovely fall day! These things house the remains of dead monks.

This bridge was a Photo Zone, so it had to be done. It was pretty. And horrifying if you looked down.

This tree stump is 1,200 years old!

 A shrine to the goddess who protects the mountain.

Temple wall!

Our dormitory.

The Ice Buddha. This was part of a big international art festival that was going on. There were little vials that you could collect the dripping water in for good luck or something. Our monk gave me one the next day. I was very excited.

Temple views.

 Here we are looking pretty cool in our temple garb.

That night we had to go to a "special program" that was happening because of the 1,000th birthday of all of these Buddhist scripts that are housed at this temple. The "program" was mostly pretentious artsy nonsense as far as I could tell. But I got some cool pictures out of the deal.

The main Buddha Hall.

Interpretive dancers veeerrrryyyy slllloooowwwwlllly walking up the stairs not at all to the beat of the experimental Buddhist noise jazz.

 One of the cool parts: The monks walking up the stairs at a reasonable pace.

More interpretive dancing.

The monks liked it. They snapped some photos on their cell phones.

Still interpretive dancing.

Still.

Yeah still.

After the interpretive dancing, I headed to bed, since wake-up was at 2:50AM.

The temple entrance looonnng before dawn.

The morning entailed some sweet drumming, followed by bowing and chanting in the main Buddha Hall. Then the Temple Stay participants were all led off to a hall where a monk led us in the 108 daily prostrations. It was interesting this time in that the prostrations were done to an English recording, so I knew why we were prostrating. Last year on my temple stay it was just chanting in Korean so it was interesting to learn more about the practice. Then we meditated for a while but someone's cell phone went off like 15 times which was pretty funny and made it hard to focus. From the experience I learned that I dead suck at clearing my mind. Oh and that I have the skeletal integrity of like an 80-year old. My hips and knees are killing me now.

Then a monk led us on a tour of the temple.

This is the tomb of a monk who is very famous for a reason that I can't remember. It reminded me of where Dumbledore was buried in Harry Potter.

Here's our monk in front of the outer gate. The gate was all covered in plasticine art as part of the art expo.

The monk explained what all of these symbols meant, but I promptly forgot.

The path up to gate two.

Our monk in front of the mountain-goddess shrine.

The Ice Buddha was much smaller by day two. Here I am with the Ice Buddha and my Buddha water.

Lotus lanterns!!!

Roof tiles!

Temple stuff!

More!

More!

Me in one of the art installations.

We survived!

And made some new friends!

All-in-all it was a good weekend. Sure smelled better there than in Hongdae. Always a plus.

Miss you Bots!

I'm presently having a study/tea party all by myself and really wish you were here! Miss you!!

Gyeongju

Lately, I've been trying to get out of Seoul for the weekends. See Korea. Avoid hangovers etc.

So last weekend a couple of my coworkers, some friends, and I took the KTX (the Korean high-speed train) all the way south to Gyeongju to see the city that Koreans consistently insist is the most beautiful place in all of Korea.

My boss helped us reserve the tickets, and as it turns out, if you get the four-person tables it is way way cheaper. Solid deal. Since we had sweet tables, we decided to make it even more obvious to everyone that we were American by having a McDonalds dinner and being as loud as possible on the way.

Heidi, Tadhg, Devon and Will.

Jon, Becky, and I.

We arrived pretty late at night (these pictures are stolen from Devon's iPhone and are from the next day) so the owners of the pension we were staying at offered to pick us up at the KTX station, because apparently their home is hard for taxi drivers to find.

The house was lovely out of control.

The lovely man, Mr. Jeong, who owned the house, built the whole thing by himself over the course of seven years and when we asked how, his response was, "The internet is very good."

There were two dogs, maybe named John and Alfie. Or maybe with Korean names that sound similar to John and Alfie. Alfie, the big one, was less than friendly despite our peace offerings of ham. John was very friendly by the end and even walked us all the way to the busstop in the mornings.

The interior of the house was lovely exposed log and terracotta and had a very ski-lodge feel to it.

With a Korean twist.

It was a bit of a hike to the busstop at the end of the lane...and we spent a lot of time sitting here wondering if we'd missed the fairly infrequent bus.

After quite a while on busses we arrived at Gyeonju's most famous site, Bulguksa Temple. We lucked out and had lovely weather despite a forecast of rain.

Jon, Becky, and I.

The scenery was lovely as well.

Here is the entrance to the temple area. Photo ops galore!

Me.

The group minus Heidi.

The Buddha in the main Buddha Hall.

Lotus lanterns and traditional Korean temple coloring.

Devon.

A study-abroad-brochure worthy photo of Tadhg (presumably) explaining the historical importance of this traditional Korean arch to Heidi.

Becky loves some traditional Korean architecture.

Bonsai!

This is special because of something about the number of lotus blossom carved on each of its tiers.

Meditative rock stacks.

I'm clearly really enjoying all of the cultural exposure.

Devon and some more Korean architecture!

It was really really pretty.

친구s!

Jon and Becky love it!

Then we hiked 4 kilometers up the mountain to check out Seokguram Grotto. The view was pretty cool but the visibility wasn't great.

You could ring this bell for mercy.

Heidi and I.

Lanterns!

Me with lanterns!

More lanterns!

This is the Grotto part. Inside was a really cool old statue of Buddha but you couldn't take pictures.

Then we headed back to our pension, because Mr. Jeong had promised to help us prepare a barbecue. Will and Mr. Jeong manned the grill.

Guess which half of the grill I was responsible for. All of the vegetables were organic and grown in Mr. Jeong's garden!!! He was the best.

After dinner, he played us some tunes on his classical guitar. He plays with an ensemble in Gyeongju seems really talented. At any rate, it was really pleasant.

John seems terrified in this photo. He was super cute, though.

Gyeongju was also full of burial mounds (as it turns out most of the Korean countryside is) and since we didn't get a chance to see any of the ones of the famous people buried there, I took this photo walking down the hill to the bus from our pension.

I miss gardens!

And really just nature in general.

All-in-all an amazing trip.