The Jones' Korean Adventure

This weekend Sam and I were invited to go with Saralyn, a fellow teacher at our school, to Daegu, a city that is south-east of Osan. Our plan was to check out a "World Heritage Site" in the area. There is a Buddhist Temple in Daegu that houses 80,000 wooden tablets that have ancient Buddhist writings carved onto them. These writings include various prayers, scriptures, and teachings.

We headed down on Saturday, and spent the day looking around the city. Daegu is famous for its shopping, and the markets and shopping districts were unreal! Anything you could possible need had a street dedicated to its sale. For example...if you ever found yourself in need of a safe, you could head over to the "safes district", and check out the numerous stores, all in a row, that were filled with safes...and only safes!

Some random things we saw on Saturday:
1. An Anti-American protest that was displaying various super-imposed pictures of George Bush...my favorite: George Bush's head on an Asian chef's body, holding a hatchet, about to chop a chicken...hmmm.
2. Another protest with 2 people wearing yellow rain-jackets with face masks covering their mouths that had little red X's on them. Oh ya, AND they were doing a dance routine. Not sure what they were protesting: "We won't speak until it rains, and to prove it, here's our rain dance". A random watcher: "Ummm, it rained this morning".
3. A body-building competition for Daegu's most muscular men...complete with tiny bikini bottoms, and oily skin...sick!

On Saturday night we stayed in another Jimjibang. Now, many of you are probably remembering my profession of love for Jimjibangs in one of the last posts, and are most likely thinking, "how nice that Becky and Sam got to revisit such a wonderful place". Let me first say that I now love SOME Jimjibangs, and this weekend's Jimjibang was definitely not a lovable one. It was much smaller, and therefore only had one hot pool, and one cold pool. Also, it had more of a "warehouse" feel...cement walls, metal stairs, and so on. There were no quiet sleeping rooms; instead, people who wanted to sleep would either fall asleep where they were or go up to an open platform to sleep. The platforms were wood floors on top of metal beams. There were no sleeping mats to use, but there were a few WOODEN pillows (???) around. Sam tried to use the wooden pillow, but then ended up just having to tilt his head back a bit so the flat spot on his head was flat against the floor...poor guy! We had to pay if we wanted to use a blanket (Sam got us 4 blankets so we could try to fold them into a sleeping pad). Here's the kicker: the night we were there, a HUGE group of teenage boys decided they would all go to the Jimjibang for a night of fun...with no parents. Of course, they wanted to stay up really, really late, and talk really, really loud. Luckily, I had ear-plugs! I guess us foreigners were the "cool thing" at the Jimjibang that night, because Sam told me that soon after we went to sleep a big group of kids all came and lied down right close to where our heads where...how funny! At one point in the night I was woken up by a loud noise, looked up and saw some random kid rolling around the floor from one end of the platform to the other for fun. I sat up, looked at him, said "No!" in my teacher voice, and he ran away...it was awesome :0) And that pretty much sums up our second-ever experience at the Jimjibang.

Sunday was great. The scenery on our bus ride to the temple was beautiful. The leaves are just starting to turn here, and the mountains were starting to show some yellows and reds! The temple was extremely busy this weekend...there was actually a festival going on that we didn't know about. The wood blocks were neat to see. I took a picture of one, and then got severely yelled at for using my flash. Luckily, because I'm a foreigner, I just had to bow politely a few times, and say "sorry, sorry, sorry", and it was like nothing had happened. The weirdest thing that day happened at the bus stop when a Korean woman sat down beside me, said something, poked me in the face, said something else, poked me in the face again, and then touched/pulled my hair. Very weird...I still have no idea what that was about! All in all, though, a great trip!

Just a friendly little snack stand - squid anyone?

Here's what the carved blocks looked like (this is the picture that got me the tongue lashing).

Honestly...who named this bus?
An artistic shot at the temple...aren't the trees beautiful?