I arrived to Seoul late at night and met up with my OT friend Dee, who had been in Seoul for 5 days prior to my arrival. We hit the ground running, as she had booked us on the 6:30am bus headed south. One of the only things we had pre booked was a 3 day temple stay at Golgulsa Temple.
We chose this temple stay because it had a lot of activities, one of which being twice per day training in Sonmudo, a Korean martial art that includes a combination of yoga, meditation, qi gong, and zen martial arts. I fell in love with the training: the amount of concentration, balance, and power required, the slow movements to engage all of our tiny muscles, and the amount of improvements we saw after just 5 sessions. Since Dee and I were doing the moves and couldn’t take pictures of ourselves, I’ll post some shots of what we looked like.
We were given outfits to wear during our temple stay and, of course, one of the first things we did was a photoshoot posing in them!
We got to go to the beach one morning (in our outfits, plus a hat!) to do our training on the rocky beach.
We also practiced 108 prostrations (a difficult bowing technique), chanting, different types of meditations, yoga, and ate delicious Korean vegetarian food. It was a great start to my Korean adventures.
The temple was all dressed up with lanterns for the upcoming holiday of Buddha’s birthday (May 5 this year). We’ve seen this at all of the temples that we’ve visited.
Next up we visited Gyeongju, which is an ancient capital city and has been described as a ‘museum without walls’. It has ancient tombs throughout the city, which actually look like huge mounds of grass.
There is a palace and wooden bridge that are must-sees when lit up at night.
It also has lots of quirky little tourist things like themed cafes, scooters dressed up like Snoopy, and novelty foods.
After a long day of walking we went to a brilliant cafe… soak your feet in an epsom salt bath while drinking your beverage, followed by a foot massage.
We spent a day at the UNESCO World Heritage village of Yangdong, which has been around since 1459.
We hiked the Namsan Historic Trail, which took us past sculptures and carvings that were 1000 years old.
And finally… food. We have had some delicious eats, with highlights being dumplings, cold noodles, and bipimbap. We stood in line at a very busy place to try the famous egg bread stuffed with red bean paste, which was ok but not a ‘need to go back’ snack.
One night Dee wasn’t feeling well, so I went out on my own for dinner. I’ll admit it, I was a little too cocky. I thought that after all of this travelling I could go into a local restaurant without an English menu or pictures and order something that I would enjoy eating. Somehow I ended up with mystery meat/organ meat soup. The worst part was that the cook was so kind and was watching me for signs of enjoyment. After a couple of meaty bits and all of the side dishes I feigned being too full from all the deliciousness.
I’ll leave you with some other shots around town, as well as other temples that are all decked out for the birthday celebrations.
