Hwa-eom-sa Temple

I didn't know quite what to expect at the temple stay. All I had really heard about was the 108 bows. Here is a little overview of our stay. We arrived at the temple in the afternoon and were given our temple clothes and led to our rooms where we would sleep. Heather and I had the room on the right, the guys on the left. Our views from both doors (there was also a door in the back) were beautiful! Before getting a tour of the temple by a monk we were taught how to bow. You start at a standing position with your hands together like in the picture. Then you kneel down and put your forehead to the ground and kind of raise your hands up and down right beside your head, then you get up again to your feet. That is one. Usually when a Buddhist enters a temple they do three of these (from what I remember learning).
Here we are on our tour of the place. Our monk was really funny but also very difficult to understand. Maybe I understood 30% of what he said, the rest of the time I just nodded and laughed when he did. When monks walk around the temple they usually hold their hands like we are holding them (we were also taught this). I guess I had forgotten and liked the pockets a bit more.
Here is the inside of the biggest temple. This is where we attended the "worship services" that Mark wrote about a few posts before. This is also where we did our 108 bows at 3:30 in the morning. (yes, it was painful to walk for days) Notice the woman in the background taking our picture...Mark also wrote about this in the post. It felt really strange to have so many people staring at us...crazyness. It was such a beautiful day and I couldn't get enough of the cherry blossoms.

After our tour of the temple we met this monk who is sitting behind the table. He meditated with us. We all sat for 20 minutes cross legged on the ground with our hands in our laps and just mediated. I was really tired and really struggled to stay awake...I was also thinking about my legs which were sore from sitting cross legged for so long. This monk told us how he meditated for 13 hours a day (with breaks of course) for three years straight! I can't imagine.

Later in the evening we had tea with him and had the chance to ask questions. Our friend Kwang Kyu who is sitting to the monk's left side was our great translator (he also planned the whole trip for us all :)). It was really interesting to learn more about Buddhism and about life as a monk.

At 9pm it time for bed....I can't remember the last time I went to bed this early! The reason they go to bed so early is because they get up every day at 3am! At 3:30 we attended a "worship service." All the "worship services" were really short, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. The monks and other Buddhists would sing/chant two songs and do a couple of bows in the middle of the songs and then that was it. After the early morning services most of the people left the temple but our group stayed with the monk from the night before who led us in doing the 108 bows.

Since breakfast was only at 6am most of us temple stayers went back to bed for an hour. Here is a picture of our breakfast. It was actually my first time to have a korean breakfast. This is actually not my plate (I didn't take this picture)...my plate was mostly rice and some tofu, I just couldn't handle all of that kimchi for breakfast.

After breakfast we went on a walk through the forest with our guide and at the stream we meditated again, this time only about 5 minutes. It was such a beautiful setting.
After handing back our temple clothes we took a group shot. The two women on the very right were kind of our guides who told us what to do when. They were really kind.

It was such an interesting and surreal experience. I feel like I could say a lot more about it but I'll stop there for now.

Green tea farm

I've been meaning to write about our weekend to the temple and to the green tea farm so here I am. It was a pretty amazing weekend. It was nice to have a break from Seoul and be surrounded by trees and what felt like clean air. I'm going backwards here, I'm starting with the green tea farm. On Sunday after the temple, we took a couple of buses and a few hours later we arrived at the farm which was in almost the most southern part of the Korean peninsula.

This green tea farm is apparantly a big tourist attraction in Korea so there were many people there. Everything there seemed to be along the green tea theme. For lunch we had green tea samgyupsal (which is kind of like bacon). They bring it to the table raw and then we fry it on the grill at our table. Notice the green tea powder sprinkled on top. For dessert we had green tea ice cream. I would prefer chocolate but it actually wasn't bad. At most ice cream places in Seoul you can also order green tea ice cream.
It was a beautiful place. We spent the afternoon wondering through the farm.
Here is our gang hiding behind the bush.
Okay, I'll write more later. I just finished teaching for the day and Tuesday is my busiest day...so I'm tired. Time to walk home in the rain. Stay tuned for more on the temple stay.

I am Johnny Depp

So this weekend we had an action packed adventure of doing a temple stay and then going to a green tea plantation in the southern part of Korea. It was a good weekend. The temple stay was at a Buddhist temple where we got to pretend to be monks for the weekend. This included meditation, tea ceremony, "worshiping" with them (I use quotation marks because it is more like paying respect to the previous teachers/buddhas as far as I understand it, and I dont completely understand it), getting up early to bow 108 times (at 3 am, and full bows from standing up to head touching the floor), getting a tour of the temple (which was gorgeous since the temple was set in the mountains with white cherry blossoms and magnolias), talking with monks and just enjoying the scenery. But more to come on this front.

Part of the experience was feeling like Johnny Depp. Having 6 foreigners walking around in temple outfits was quite the thing for many of the people who were visiting the temple. This mostly occurred when a kind older monk was giving us a tour of the temple in English. He was using his best English (and it was very good English), but to try to communicate Eastern understanding of metaphysics in a Western language which utilizes western understandings of metaphysics would be challenging enough for seasoned translators, and this is where the problem came in.

As we were trying to concentrate on the explanation of the different artifacts in the temple we would have many Koreans (both children and adults alike) see us, start whispering to there fellow travelers about waygookeen (Korean word for foreigner and i refer you to a previous post "waygookeen" which has a good link about this if your interested), perhaps a giggle would follow and then if they were brave enough they would say "Hello" or "Where are you from?" If we were standing in one place, listening to an explanation, it was not uncommon to have people come up to us, maybe about 3 feet away, and just stare at us, take a picture or two of us, stare a little more, and then they would keep walking. Little kids were perhaps the funniest with shocked and awed faces. Personally I didn't want to laugh when someone is telling you about the history of their temple, but it was difficult to keep a straight face as one little kid came up with a face out of a looney tunes cartoon with his chin dropped, eyes wide open and staring in awe for a number of minutes.

Because of a hair cutting mishap on Friday night, I ended up shaving my head before we left, not with a razor, but just a buzz (the monks razor their heads). But my hair was short enough that it was easy for one little kid to mistake me for a monk. A little kid came up in front of me and gave me a low bow. I bowed back respectfully not knowing what to do and confused as to why this kid was bowing to me and after, when he was able to see my face, he became red and unsure of what to do realizing that i wasn't a monk but a foreigner. Later I found out that temple culture is that when you see a monk, you are to bow to them and they will bow back.

It was a lot of fun and we will post more pictures and reflections on our time there, but I thought i would start with our experience of feeling like Johnny Depp. Here are a few pictures and we will post more pictures later. I really liked the white of the cherry blossoms on the green background. This is the building where we slept.


At the beginning of a "worship" session, which occurs three times a day (morning, afternoon and night), they play the drum, bell and gong. Each represents something, the skin of the drum represents animals and people and with each beat our suffering is lifted out of us. I forget what the other two things mean.



more scenery




main building in the temple where we had worship service.

views in and around our apartment and work

I thought I would post some pictures of our area...since I had received some requests to do so.
This is taken on the main street that we walk down every day. Connexus is a block off of this street and our apartment is a few blocks off of the street about 20 minutes north of this picture This is Connexus' street. It is a smaller street where cars and people seem to weave around each other. Connexus is on the left somewhere in the mix of the signs.

Here we are back on the main street. This is what we meet almost every night as we walk home. The sidewalks aren't this busy all the way to our place...they empty out a bit maybe after 10 minutes of walking.


The sidewalks are lined with these vendors where many people congregate to get a bite.
Now some more views of our apartment from our housewarming party on Saturday night. Here we are playing some games. The traditional Korean games that we played needed a soft service hence the towels spread out on the floor.

This game is called hwatu. It is a traditional Korean game. Maybe it can be compared to poker. I haven't quite wrapped my mind around it yet...it's so confusing.
...but I think the cards are really cute. They are all plastic and some times they have to be thrown down on the table..why, I don't know but it looks cool. Mark knows more about it.
Here is the view from our apartment window. This tree is actaully starting to bud so I'm looking forward to being able to see a nice green tree outside our window.

This is our street. Our apartment is on the left.
Here are some more random shots in our neighborhood.

waygookeen

Its rather embarrassing, but we have been here for 8 months now and our ability in Korean is alarmingly low. Its hard when we work at an English school and speak English with all our students. This leaves us with little opportunity to practice the rudimentary Korean that we do know. Even at a store, most Koreans want to practice there English and respond to our Korean with English. Oh well. We'll keep trying.
But one word we do know in Korean is "waygookeen" which means foreigner. Its funny when you dont understand 99% of what people say but you can hear the word for foreigner as you walk by a group of people. Rather than write a lot about this experience, here is a link for a person teaching English and writing a blog for Walrus magazine. He has a good blog post on this topic and looks at the experience of foreigners in Korea, which is one of the most homogeneous cultures in the world.

The Bow

I still can't get quite used to all of the bowing here. The other day Mark and I were waiting for a big department store to open so we were standing in front of the doors with a group of people. We could see a number of workers in the store standing at their counter or by the door waiting to open it. Four women in matching outfits were the door openers. Suddenly some Korean came through the speakers and everyone started to bow to us and the door openers turned to bow to each other and then to us again (from what I remember) and then they opened the doors. It was quite the opening.

Today I was walking to work and I passed a group of four older women. They were wearing matching outfits. As I walked by they bowed to me and said hello in Korean. I said hello back and then they thanked me. I have no idea who these women are...random.

The other day we heard that the convenience store down the street from Connexus was handing out free ice cream so we left our work and went to get some. The guy gave us the ice cream and we gave him a Connexus pen...he bowed so low to thank us I thought he might fall over.

Anyway, just something I have been noticing lately...I find it interesting.

Don't OTL

Konglish is a term used by Koreans for English words that have been adopted into Korean but are words or phrases that native English speakers don't use. While this term may not be the most politically correct term, my students use it, so I'll use it. Such examples are:

eye shopping - instead of window shopping
CC (which means campus couple) - for couples who met at university
skinship - kinda like PDA, public displays of affection
OST - are soundtracks for films (i think it means original soundtrack)
wellbeing - for the healthy, organic trend
deca (pronounced Dee Ka) - digital camera

These are just a few examples of what comes out in class. Another new thing is how texting has changed English. For example lol is now commonly used to express; lot of laughs. Since everyone over the age of 10 has a cell phone in Korea, it is natural that our students teach us new expressions for texting in English. The latest one is, "Don't OTL."

If you look closely enough, OTL looks like a person on their hands and knees and their head down. Essentially it means, dont be sad or cheer up. We thought it was interesting so we thought we would share it with all of you. So here's hoping that you are all not OTL.

Our new home

So, we are all moved in! This weekend was very exhausting so I'm really happy we are all settled in now. And hopfully now I'm a little stronger after carrying a lot of our furniture down five flights of stairs! My arms are still a little sore. So here are some pictures of our new place. Your eyes will probably be drawn to our lovely pink wall with white flowers. Yes, I noticed this right away as well. Adds a little colour to the room. And I'm really happy because we have a bathtub...the door beside our lovely "closet" is the door to the bathroom..still no shower curtain so the bathroom still gets wet but that's okay.
Welcome to our kitchen. The clear door to the left is the door to a tiny room that pretty much only fits our washing machine and our suitcase.
I thought I would give you a close up of the wall. Doesn't it just make you happy....maybe?
So, we really like the place. Still small but it's big enough for us. The area is a little quieter as well than our last place. It feels more like a residential area. When we look out our window we don't see any flouriscent lights only the neighboring apartments. But a 10 second walk and we see the lights again. We also walk down a really crazy busy shopping and business street on our way to work. The best part of the walk is the thrift store that we pass everyday...these are hard to come by in Seoul.