The Jones' Korean Adventure

On Friday, we decided to go and see Beomosa Temple. After a subway trip, and a harrowing taxi ride up the mountain (the driver didn't understand that the center line in the middle of the road shouldn't be crossed when going around tight corners), we arrived.

This was the first building we came to after entering through the gates of the temple. On the inside were beautiful paintings. I don't know if you can see it clearly, but on the right of this building, really tall bamboo was growing. It looked really neat!

There were tons of little shrine buildings all over the temple grounds. Most of them looked like this on the inside. There was usually a gold buddha in the middle with two statues of his "attendants" on either side. There were a lot of people at the temple grounds, and we saw them in the various shrines, bowing down and praying to the statues. This is me in front of the 3-tiered pagoda. All of the buddhists who passed by this structure would stop, bow at it, and then continue. We found out that this is actually the centre of their worship. This pagoda is thought to embody the Buddha and all of his teachings.
As you can see from this picture, it was definitely beautiful up at the temple. It was green all around, with rolling hills and mountains in the distance. Most of the shrine rooms looked like this building, and were placed around the temple grounds. The white statue in this picture is a 9-tiered pagoda.
This is Sam in front of what we thought must have been a meeting room for the monks at this temple. It was an open room on the inside with a painting of Buddha on the wall, and various pillows to sit on around the room.