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.