Pilgrimage

As many of you know, I love the movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, a film about two monks in Korea. It gave me unrealistically high expectations for Korean Buddhism and gave me an appreciation of ritualized space (see the movie, it's gorgeous and powerful). The movie was shot at Juson pond, an artificial lake created about two hundred years ago that still has several hundred year old trees growing from its depths:Naturally, I decided to visit the location of this story that has had such a large impact on my impressions of Korea (not to mention my decision to come here in the first place) and my search for serenity and mindfulness.

Alanna and I spent an afternoon in the bus getting to Cheongsong, a small city in central Southeastern Korea. The bus stations was absolutely crawling with spiders, which often shared the same webs:

[note: Alanna took about three quarters of the pictures in this post,
not including the ones from the movie]

The town itself isn't particularly noteworthy except as a gateway to Juwangsan National Park, though it did have this great this great 'Tangible Cultural Artifact' number something or other. (Korea has numbered their national treasures, and I've seen some of the highest ranked ones, like a pagoda in Seoul that is national treasure number three. There are also Precious National Monuments, which include things like the Jindo breed of dog. Everything important to the country is categorized and ranked. National Treasure number one was destroyed by an arsonist about six months before I came to Korea.)
Early the next day we entered the actual park.At the entrance was Deajeonsa temple (both it and the city in which I live have names meaning 'great field').
This shrine was for a mountain god:Outside of it were many dragonflies. I've seen tens of thousands of dragonflies this month. I am surprised that the dragonfly isn't a greater symbol in Korean culture and art.
Inside another building at the temple complex were these statues:Past the temple we followed a stream through a valley between craggy peaks.Along the way we detoured to see a couple temples and small caves, one of which held another shrine to a mountain god (you can tell because he has a tiger):More mountains, waterfalls, etc:
We walked along a ridge for a while, and at the highest peak (a modest one, under 900m) we had a nice view over a misty valley.
From that point on we followed a stream along a path that kept crossing the stream without bridges, so that we spent a lot of time trying to find the best stepping stones across. Finally, we reached a far end of the park, where we had to leave and reenter about a kilometer away to get to Jusan Pond. In the movie, the pond had unearthly beauty:In real life it was beautiful, but in a very earthly way:
I wasn't disappointed; I knew that it wouldn't live up to the view of it enhanced with skillful cinematography. Also, the floating temple and the gateway were only placed in the pond for the duration of the filming and had to be removed afterwards (it's ok to have an observation deck for some reason but not the awesome temple...). Actually, the very real earthly beauty of the place helped me to realize how many places in Korea are incredibly beautiful. I had idealized this pond in my mind, and the reality, instead of decreasing my awe of the pond, elevated my awe of everywhere else. I may not have had as great a sense of enlightenment and spiritual journey as the story's protagonist, but I have in my own way become much more appreciative of my life and experiences.

The future

Another road block to my ever updating about my actual life and adventures (I will someday soonish, I promise) has arrived in the form of a blog about architecture and cyborgs, which has posts with titles like "astronauts and super villians".

(hat tip Emily Horne)

So 'true'

I have lots to update about, but instead I will leave you with this:

Intensives and eclipse

(view of the eclipse from India, stolen from the BBC)

Not only do Korean children have incredibly short summer vacations (about a month), but they still have to go to academy (i.e. what I teach). Some children have to take even more classes at academy to ensure that they have no time to just be children. Our school calls this month of extra classes 'intensives'. This happens every year, but as with the start of the new school year, it caught my bosses completely off guard. We got our schedules on the Thursday morning before the classes started, but we weren't told what the hell we were doing in those classes until after the last class of the day on Friday. And by 'told', I mean that ambiguous minimal instructions were left taped to the white board in the teacher's room. We've been scrambling and screwing up all week, but two of the people here only have a month left, one only has this week, and Will and I have been infected by the contagious senioritis. In addition to all my normal classes, teach reading and writing classes, and a class on Harry Potter, in which they will theoretically read a book a week for four weeks.

On the 22nd we took a break from the intensive classes and escorted the children to the roof to watch the most impressive solar eclipse for decades and the longest lasting one for the next century. I didn't know about it until I got to work (thanks Will!) so I didn't have my camera, but it looked like a waning moon only of course it was much brighter. The children were given sheets of colored plastic, which when folded over a few times provided a little protection for their eyes, so hopefully none of us damaged our vision too badly.



Update: photos taken and collected by Will:


This is what we saw with our colored sheets of plastic:This is the view from the space station:

Incheon

This weekend my company sent me to a conference in Seoul dubbed a 'refresher course,' which is amusing since I was never given any training to begin with so I could hardly be refreshed on it. I ended up being hours late due to confusing the Sincheon subway stop for the Sinchon stop, both of which are on the same subway line but completely on the far side of the city from each other. I realized the growth I've had since a year or two ago I would have been exceedingly frustrated and anxious about being late even though there was nothing I could do to go faster. Instead I was calm and mildly bemused. The second presentation (i.e the one I was actually present for) was dull and highly condescending (the speaker treated us like seven year old just now learning English rather than people whose English was far superior to hers), though it did have a couple useful points. Afterward Alanna and I had dinner at an all you can eat buffet of delicious Indian food, where I ate to the point of being uncomfortably full for the first times in three years (right after I got back from Europe my stomach capacity was greatly diminished but I ate at a barbecue as if I was still a teenager. I am not quite as skinny now, but I certainly don't gorge myself as much as I once did).

We spend Sunday in Incheon, the city of 2.5 million that is Seoul's port and is really part of the greater Seoul area. It is mostly industrial and about what one would expect from a modern port city, but there is a small area that is remarkable for its diversity (by Korean standards) of influences. For starters, it has a great China town: As we finished a brunch of pork and onion dumplings larger than my fist we heard the drums of a parade:The porters were carrying whoever wanted to be at the head of the procession:Up the stairs from the statue was a friendly cat:
Above Chinatown was a hill with a nice overlook of the harbor:
Also on the hill was a monument commemorating 100 years since the amnity treaty between the United States and Korea. It was far more interesting than the usual pillar-with-statues-and-bronze-placard monuments one sees everywhere. People were playing badminton in the shadow of the monument: The park also had a statue dedicated to General Douglas MacArthur on a pedestal stamped with the UN symbol:
It was notable for the contrast between MacArthur's grandfatherly visage and the usual statues of generals in armor mounted on barbed steeds, and because I am fascinated by propaganda, such as that found on the placard below it:

... And until the last battle against the malignant infection of communism has been won may we never forget it was also he who said, "In war, there is no substitute for victory."

The park also contained oddities such as an aviary filled with birds that I think of as commonplace, but which are of course exotic half a world away, including a turkey in full display:
Incheon is most interesting for the varied influences on it. It has a Chinese district that borders upon a Japanese district. Many of the Japanese buildings (banks seemed to have survived particularly well) were designed by Europeans:
Another interesting building was much more modern: it was completely covered in bottlecaps:On the way out of town we stopped back in Chinatown for what I can't help but refer to as pot stickers, since they were delicious pork-stuffed buns that were cooked by literally sticking them to the inside of a large heated ceramic pot.

Update: this post has been supplemented with the addition of Alanna's pictures.