Apologies to the Internet

I do suck at this, eh? I have no legitimate excuse for my long absence – it isn’t as though I don’t spend long hours at my computer on a regular basis – but somehow, every time it occurs to me to settle down and git’er’done, something completely unpressing demands my immediate attention. So I’m sorry, and I’m going to try and make it up to you, my nearly nonexistent readers / friends / family, by surfing rapidly through the last several weeks, all the way back to my summer vacation of mid-July. I then intend, depending upon my degree of awakeness, to track quickly back up to today, scanning subjects including: last week’s field trip, a brand new collection of adorable Koala pictures, and my second and more recent vacation to the eastern coastal town of Sokcho.

Watch me go.

Temple Trotting Like It Was My Job

Gyeongsanbuk-do, where I spent my vacation, is fairly famous throughout Korea as the heart of its historical legacy, preserved far better here in the form of temples, shrines, and artifacts, than anywhere else in a country that has suffered a really inconsiderate run of invasions, burnings, uprisings and the like. I started in Daegu, where two of the best temple complexes remaining in S.Korea are accessible as day trips. The first, Haeinsa, is astounding primarily for the library it contains; the entire 81000-some woodblock collection of the Tripitaka Koreana, the complete teachings of Korean Buddhism, inscribed in the 12th century and preserved ever since. The structure that contains the Tripitaka was itself constructed some 450 years ago, but was such a miracle of foresight and ventilation-engineering that, two decades ago when the Korean dictator Park…something-or-other spent millions on a high-tech library facility with state of the art antiquities preservation equipment, five of the woodblocks were moved as a test case and immediately began to molder. I wasn’t hugely impressed by Haeinsa itself; it nestles too deeply into the valley, and doesn’t manage quite the feeling of complete harmony that I experienced at several other temple sites. It does, however, offer access to several small hermitages that made my breath catch in my throat.

PICTURE BREAK

Absolutely gorgeous painting hidden deep in the eaves of a shrine. Required some artful balancing to get close enough for this picture.

The Tripitaka Koreana. Appearances to the contrary, you can’t actually walk up and touch them; I had to take this picture squeezing my camera through the bars of an ancient wooden access grate.

A stunning ancillary temple some three kilometers hike above Haeinsa. I got myself lost, as I am wont to do, and found a sort of abandoned-looking footpath, and wandered up and up until suddenly there this temple was protruding from the living rock. Massive heartponies.

On the bus ride to Haeinsa, I was peering out the left-hand window, and we suddenly drove by this shrine. The bus didn’t stop there, the maps didn’t mention it, the guide book ignored it completely, but… I mean damn, look at it. So after doing the whole temple complex, I hiked down the access road to find this and relax for a bit. The relaxing wasn’t so much pre-planned but rather a response to realizing that having hiked 4km down a mountain in 80 degree, 85% humidity weather, I then had to climb back up. Ah well.

Jikjisa and the Jikji Family Sculpture Park

If anywhere encompassed the feeling of a Buddhist temple complex, it was Jikjisa. I have never been anywhere that felt so serenely, ideally situated exactly where it was. Unfortunately this feeling is rather fleeting compared to the power I imagine it once carried, as there are so very very many people that I could never escape the sound of cars or the chatter of ajuumas for long. There was a pretty cool museum occupying one of the old hermitages, but unfortunately everything inside was labeled exclusively in faded Korean, so my sense of what artifacts the temple still maintains is pretty slipshod.

The entrance-gateway; one of seven ceremonial gateways leading you up a rolling slope into the bowl of a hidden valley containing the temple proper.

An old stone bridge heading towards what I imagine are the modern-day residences of the monks. Some cool clouds in the background, too!

Convinced a cute little kid to take a picture of me. Yeah Mom, I really went!

The silk-screens of the central shrine at Jikjisa. These would not have survived the Japanese invasion of the 16th century, as the vast majority of the complex was put to the torch, but the three screens were somehow concealed in a cave and lay forgotten for twenty years before being rediscovered sometime in the early 1600s. To be quite frank, any and possibly all parts of this story with the exception of the age of the screens are suspect; the age I got off a plaque, everything else I got from a stooped and 30% incomprehensible old Korean man who accompanied me for a while for no apparent reason.

An amazingly, delightfully happy old woman I saw playing in the stream with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson.

Between the bus station in Gwangyeung and Jikjisa itself is a very cool ‘family park’ completely covered in reading nooks, rock gardens, and interesting sculpture. This entry is already going to be megaoverloaded with pictures so I’m only putting up one that amused me, but if you check my webshots you’ll find many more, all of them fairly cool. Anyway, this is pretty self-explanatory. This sign looks like the Scarecrow in Oz if only the Scarecrow had a little more gay pride…

Gyeongju, Bolguksa and Seokguram

After leaving Daegu, I hopped a bus to the city of Gyeongju. This is now a fairly quiet, semi-touristed town with a lot of rice- and lotus-fields, but it was at one point the center of the Silla dynasty, and has retained a lot of really unique history on that basis.

So they’re not as impressive as, say, the Pyramids, but the old Silla leaders had a certain style of their own burying themselves. They basically just hugely magnified the basic ‘burial mound’ idea, filling them with treasures and then covering them with stones and trees; what makes it impressive is the sheer number of these mounds, tumulis, that just litter the entire countryside. This is the largest within the city of Gyeongju proper, and there is a freaking delicious dakgalbi place that has a patio right on the foot of the mound. When they light it up at night it’s a surprisingly moving place to sit and watch the stars.

Bolguksa Temple is about twenty minutes south of Gyeongju, on the inner slope of a mountain whose front face overlooks the Sea of Japan and the primary route of attack that Japanese pirates followed through the sea-mounts. Like Jikjisa, it is simply too crowded to feel entirely at ease, but the architecture was stunning.

A reflecting pool just inside the entrance.

A shot of the ascent to the Middle Land; the whole temple is constructed around zones of Ascension, where one proceeds by stages closer to the land of Buddha and the central shrine. It took me a good five minutes standing frustrated to get enough clearspace to take this shot. Totally worth it though.

What can I say? This is maybe one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken. Definitely worth checking out at full resolution.

On the side of the mountain facing the sea is a little grotto called Seokguram. I think it’s the most-visited tourist site in Korea; certainly, by people : square footage ratio it shouldn’t even be a contest, as the entire grotto is about the size of an outhouse. I don’t know quite how to describe it, and I was too enthralled to take pictures, so I’m just gonna steal one off the internet to give you all a sense of the interior. It’s a shrine built into a cave on the mountainside, and apparently watching the sunrise over the sea is fucking glorious. Missed that part though.

I did some other things, too

I went to see two movies [the fantastic Wanted, the hardly watchable Mummy 3], ate a lot of good food, including some very strange regional kimchis, made friends with a cute monk who may or may not have been between the ages of 14 and 95, rode the KTX supertrain at 304kph, and read a lot of good books. But I think that’s about all I have to say about it for now, unless I seem to be missing anything blatantly obvious.

Vacation: The Remix

So this last Friday was Korean Independence Day, and Lindsay and Denise and I decided to take the three day weekend and go check out the north-eastern coast, on the Sea of Japan, as we’d heard that it was fun and the water was beautiful. In classic foreigners-living-abroad style, the three of us soon ballooned to fourteen of us, and it was only by the grace of her mighty Invisible Pink Unicorn that there were only two hotel rooms to be had for love or money and we were able to cut it down to nine.

I can’t go into depth regarding the events of the weekend, as I have reputations — mine own included — to think about, but here’s a semi-sanitized summary followed by some comedy in the form of my beast of a hairstyle.

- Only one person was brought to the hotel by the cops!
- But another was brought home aback a bicycle propelled by a Korean man well on the far side of 70.
- Nobody is quite sure what prompted either of these modes of transportation.
- A tiny Korean lifeguard assaulted a solid 6ft+ Aussie with an umbrella pole… not once, but twice.
- A giant inflatable hot dog, towed at high speed by JetSki, was capsized not once; not thrice, but at least six times, to the evident and comical frustration of the operator. But he charged way too much for a 5 minute ride and we had no choice but to make it a 10 minute ride instead.
- A massive Korean transvestite beach rave emcee was befriended, antagonized, refriended, and then eventually fled from.
- A fried-chicken restaurant was made the site of a food [mostly liquor] fight par extraordinaire, which really seemed like the last straw as far as our behavior was concerned, except that the owner and other patrons loved it and insisted on pushing free soju on us.
- Swimming with swimwear on is overrated.

Enough.

Hahaha.

Enjoying the hotel patio for hours.

Little reading party – all fully dressed, as the sun refused to come out all day Friday. It was still a lovely beach, though, and the water was the sort of perfect temperature that feels so close to body warmth that you’re just floating in nothingness.

I am the master of beasts.

Doing what I do best!

As promised, some new pictures of babies

Assuming anyone has made it this far, other than my future self, checking back for metaposterity, here are my Koalas lookin’ lovely as usual.

I can’t imagine anyone spending a day with these two and not wishing to kidnap them forever.

My newest Koala – Lisa.

Ahhhh, little rockstars!

We got new floormats to replace our foul old carpet. It has a penguin in a hot-air balloon on it, but I guess other than that I can forgive it. And look at Jiee run!

The two quietest, sweetest boys in the class. If only they’d lighten up a bit!

Dance dance dance!

And I have to stop now, before I break this page forever. Assuming I haven’t already.

Love,
-Ben