Somthing Korean Other than Kimchi

Yesterday was Korean Culture Day for me. My director took me and his wife and his 81 year old Buddhist mother to Heinsa Temple outside of Daegu. This temple was built in the 5th century and has numerous National Treasures within. I have to say the experience was pretty damn awesome.

First of all, the mother is a member of the temple so everytime we came to a gate and they would tell us that we couldn't go further up the mountain, the mother would yell at the securtiy guard in Korean until he had no choice but to let us through. She yelled us all the way to right beside the main temple. For those of you at home, that is like parking onstage at the Oscars. So she gets out and runs, I mean runs, towards the temple. I've never seen an old broad move so fast. We get into the temple and the monks are in the middle of a chant. The mother grabs me and takes me right up to the front where we pray right next to the monks. I felt like royalty!

Next, we go for lunch. Wow, my first Korean buffet. Granted, it was just rice, kimchi, and other regular Korean dishes, but I am eating with monks. I don't know if it was commonplace, but noone talked during lunch. Not one of the 200 people in the hall. After lunch, we took the mother to one of the templings (I don't know what else to call them) and we took off to check out the lay of the land. Sooooo cool! There were 8-10 smaller teples and each one was super old and dedicated to a staple of Korean life. For example, there were the Mountain Temple and the Temple of the Sea.

The temples were really beautiful, but my favorite part of wlking around was the scenery. This temple was way up the mountain and you could see the valley below. It kind of felt like Jasper or Banff.

After we got enough of that, we said goodbye to his mother ( she would stay there for the night) and she thanked me so much for coming to the temple. I said: she thanked me! We took off to the bottom of the mountain and went and chilled in the river valley below. We three took off our socks and shoes and went walking through the river. Little swells and waterfalls everywhere. I'll tell you something about Koreans; they've got energy to burn. The director and his wife are like 55 years old and I could barely keep up with them. We found a good swell and dangled our legs off of some rocks. I almost felt like I was back in Edmonton's glorious river valley. Until I saw a bug that looked like it swallowed a small mammal!

Oh, and I went downtown to a club last night with the aforementioned Jerry and Jamie. Was Ok, but the place was small and packed and hot as hell. In other words, I went to O'Byrnes last night. Took a cab home and the cabbie dropped me off in the wrong spot. Had to take another cab after walking around for a half an hour. You won this round anonymous cabbie!

Take off eh. You Hosers!