Okay, this this took way longer than a few days to post. I've finally found time to update, so here it is!
At the end of April I went to stay overnight at
Buseoksu Buddhist temple with my friend
Jeong hee. We took the bus to
Yeong ju and were then met by a man whose passion is this temple. He had offered to drive us to the temple and show us around at no charge - so nice! Unfortunately I'm not sure of his name - one of the drawbacks in Korea is that people rarely call each other by their actual names. Case in point, all of the Korean teachers I work with are called Funny Teacher, Sunny Teacher, etc; the names of their classrooms; and after 3 months none of us know their given names.
Anyway, we arrived at the temple and it was beautiful, it is up in the mountains which I was told makes it one of the nicest in Korea. Our guide showed us around for a bit and then we went to 'check in' . We were greeted by a monk who showed us our room, we would be sharing it with about 8 or so other women who would be coming and going all night from prayers in the temple. After he showed us the room he invited us to come have tea with him.
Jeong hee told me this almost never happens and it was likely because I'm from Canada. So there are some benefits to being a foreigner! We went for tea and chatted with him for awhile, he was very kind and friendly.
The strangest thing for me to see was that all the monks had cell phones! Here we were in this peaceful, serene temple and then heard cell phones ringing and saw many of monks walking around talking on them. While we were having tea I think the monk was interrupted 2 or 3 times by phone calls. Somehow I imagined them living this very barren lifestyle without technology, boy was I wrong. The also had the latest computers with huge flat screen monitors in their offices. Crazy....
That night we had dinner at the temple and then went to the drum ceremony and then to the evening prayers at 9 pm. One of the highest monks in Korea was speaking that night, but it was all in Korean so I didn't get much of it. After this the meditation started at 10 pm so we decided to stay for a while, well, at least we thought we could just stay for a little while... when we got up to leave at around 10:40 we were told by about 4 older women to sit down and stay. This was pretty common on our visit, we felt like we were following orders for most of the weekend! So we sat down and stayed until 11 when there was a break, then we decided to head to bed! We thought we could get about 4 and 1/2 hours sleep before the dawn ceremony at 3:30 am!!
It turned out that sleep was a bit hard to come by. We got to the room and discovered that all the blankets and pillows were taken. After some rearranging we were able to find a spot on the floor and one of the ladies offered us a blanket. We used this as a cushion on the floor and then had to figure out what to do about pillows. I was able to use my jacket, it was hard as a rock, but better than nothing and
Jeong hee ended up using some books that the monk lent to us. She said it wasn't too bad, but I'm not so sure.... After we finally got everything arranged I attempted to fall asleep, but it was almost exactly at that moment when one of the women in the room started snoring so loudly! Then people started coming and going and turning the lights on and off and I thought 'this is never going to happen', but miraculously it did. So we got about 3 hours in before the morning alarm sounded.
We went to the dawn ceremony until 4 am and then back to our room. I could only stay awake for about 15 minutes and was then fast asleep until the 6 am alarm sounded. We got up to have breakfast and this was a different experience for me. Breakfast was almost exactly like dinner the night before, it included rice, tofu soup, spicy
kimchi, hot peppers, dried seaweed and a few other things I can't remember. I did my best but it was far to early in the day for me to eat
kimchi, despite how much I like it! I was craving cereal or toast, but made do with rice and soup.
One of the funniest parts of the weekend was that I actually scared a few of the older women. They must have been expecting to see only Korean faces and when they saw me a couple of them gasped in surprise and one woman actually screamed a little! A quiet scream, but still... I also looked up to a few times over the weekend to see strangers taking a picture of me. So weird....
That morning we went for a long walk and to buy a souvenirs, as many of you may know, I can't pass up a souvenir stand! Then we had tea with the monk a second time and were on our way. I had a great time and definitely want to go back at least one more time while I'm here. Sunday afternoon we went to an apple blossom festival with our 'tour guide' but I think I've written enough for tonight so I might write about that in another post. I must be making up for taking so long to post again, this is really long. Hope you've been able to stick with it and read it all!!
