Only in Korea

Do you know what exists? Corn ice cream with actual kernels of corn in it:
What's stranger is that it is delicious.

Magoksa Temple and Haemi Fortress

Alanna and I have been saddened that most of our weekend plans have been ruined by festivals being canceled due to paranoia about swine flu. We wanted to go to a martial arts festival, or the drum festival or Seoul fireworks festival the same weekend, but all three were canceled. We are pretty good at adapting to the circumstances, though, so instead we went to Magoksa temple and Haemi fortress.

Magoksa is most notable for actually looking as old as it is (the buildings are 200-400 years old). Most temples in Korea have been recently repainted, which makes them all look the same whether they were built 5 or 500 years ago since all Korean temples use the same color scheme, whereas Magoksa's paint is weathered.
Magoksa is full of dragon iconography, which I'm sure you've realized by now I can't get enough of.
Note the dragon's tail on the inside of the building:A lot of the ceiling beams were curved wood made to look like dragons:
I loved this two story wood building:
The gate to the temple had the traditional four giant guardians of the cardinal directions, who always are subjugating human sized demons, one of which had three eyes in this version:
Other temple buildings:
Note the duck in the rafters:
There was also a room with over 1000 Buddhist statues, each a little different from the others:

After touring the temple we went out to the town of Haemi where we stayed the night. Had we realized that we were about two blocks from the fortress we would have gone to see it lit up at night, but we thought it was further away. Oh well. In the morning we saw that Haemi is a pretty typical Korean fortress consisting of baracks and other buildings inside a wall with ornate gate houses:

There were various reconstructions of weaponry, clothing, houses and traditional games from Korea's history:
The people working here showed up a flower that either blooms every hundred years or just has a name that heavily implies so:
Also, more hanging vegetables:
The fortress has a folk museum in its walls, so we got to see old men and women weaving baskets and sandals in the traditional manner.
The older generations here feel like they are imported straight from the past wherever I see them, so this felt very authentic, far more so than, say, colonial Williamsburg. I see old people planting harvesting vegetables by hand in the gardens I see on the way to work, so I think the people at the folk reenactment might do the same activities even if they were at home.
I was most impressed by the sandal-making, which involves the use of one's toes:
Haemi has an interesting history as a place of persecution of christians. Hundreds of them were executed there in the 1860s.
One building had an amusing animatronic reenactment of a speech about keeping out all foreigners and foreign influence, including religions:
I'm still not sure what these rock mounds are for. In many areas they are shamanist, but I don't know if that makes sense in the government built area, since the government was usually Confucian.
On our way back we stopped in Gongju and saw a fortress-like church:
We also saw this (probably) unintentionally funny sign:
We were planning on going to some beaches at Taein National Park, but that didn't work out with buses and schedules so we just went home.