Buddhas B-day

So the twenty fourth of May this year was the jolly fat mans (Buddhas) birthday. All over Asia this day is celebrated as the devote make their way to the temples to pray for a successful year while the less devote, i.e. us English teachers, mearly head out for the free food that the monks hand out to the masses.
Thursday, the holiday itself, was great, expect for the rain that came a little later. We all made it to the appropriate bus stop at the right time and headed out to Hwamsaa temple, a little out of the way place that we figured would be a better time than the better known temples at Nak-san and Sorak.
After hiking a bit after our bus ride we finally made it out to the temple itself and spent most of the morning wandering around and talking while waiting for the food to be served.
We had a great time watching monks drumming and seeing the faithful bowing towards the golden Buddhas. The entire temple complex was heavily decorated for the festivities with rows and rows of paper lanterns hung in honour of Buddha.
Pictures
1. The view of the massive stone that marks the entrance to the temple
2. It is only on rare occasions that non monks are allowed into the bell area, and Buddhas birthday is one of them. This is the massive drum that you hear when it is time for prayers.
3. The head monk, I think, banging the massive drum that signals the start of prayers.
4. Bibimbap, kimchi, and soup, the traditional birthday lunch. Bibimbap is one of my favourite things to eat in Korea, a mix of rice, seaweed, red pepper paste, and vegetabels.
5. Strings of lanterns litter the forcourt of the temple.

A little Nature Hike

After eating a great meal, courtesy of the monks at Hwamsaa Temple, I led our merry band down through some fields, stream beds, and lakes to get home. Despite a few misgivings and some potential rumblings of mutiny from the crew about my benevolent leadership, much to every ones surprise I eventually got us all home, within eighteen minutes of when I said I would.
It really was a great hike, encompassing large parts of rural Korea. We headed through fields, orchards, forests, lakes, dry stream beds and full ones, it was really memorable, made more so by the fact that about half way through a nice soaking rain started to hit. (Thanks for coming with me Aubrey, Kirsty, Helen, and Paul.)
Pictures
1. This is how rice looks before it is planted. It is a really timeless process, planting the rice. If you see people doing it it looks just like it must have been done a thousand years ago. The first thing that has to happen is the rice paddy must be tilled, not a bad job, you can do it with a tractor. Next, it gets a little more involved and labour intensive. The farmer has to string miles of flexible pipe to bring in the water to flood it to a depth of about six inches. Finally the little rice shoots that you see in picture one are hand planted.
2. We saw a huge number of frogs on this hike, this is just one of many.
3. Spring flowers that have fallen into the stream.

Random Shots

I went out for a little half drunken stroll with my good friend Mark the other night. It was fairly warm, the first really warm night of the summer, and we grabbed a few ice cold bottles of Cass and headed out.
We hit all the high points on the north end of Sokcho, the ferry terminal, a pavilion that overlooks the ocean, the rocks by the beach where we sat and drank yet more beer, and finally the sea police memorial.
Along this grand trek I was able to find a few photographic opportunities for my faithful viewers.
1. Sitting by the beach having a cold beer I spied this little kid perched on one of the huge concrete blocks they put on the seafront to combat erosion.
2. The memorial to the sea police who have lost their lives in cross border raids with the D.P.R.K. since the end of the war in 1953.
3. A cold front had passed through Sokcho earlier in the day leaving this incredible line of clouds moving across the east sea towards Japan.
4. A poster in the ferry terminal with a great message.

Hwamsaa

These are some pictures of Hwamsaa temple, a little visited part of rural Korea that was originally built around 1509. It lies about five miles outside of town and you can only reach it by car or by foot and since I don't have a car...................
It really is a nice temple, one of the nicest I have been to in Korea. It sits on a low ridge beneath the main line of mountains and is surrounded by flowering trees. Smaller than most temples, with only a few buildings, it is wonderfully painted with a very nice boulder filled, fast rushing stream that runs through the grounds.
Pictures
1. Ulzambowi Rock, the main ridge that you can see from anywhere in Sokcho.
2. Flowering trees and rocks that frame the tea house at Hwamsaa
3. One of the small prayer halls at Hwamsaa
4. The bell pavilion that calls the monks to prayer
5. The giant hand painted drum that rings every morning and night that opens and closes the day.

Splish Splash

After almost two years in Korea I got to go diving. Diving is immensely popular here in the land of the morning calm and especially so here in the clean waters of Sokcho. You cannot throw a stone without hitting a dive shop around here. Every weekend in the spring, summer, and early fall, you can see groups of beginners, like me, and experts heading out to dive the beaches and off shore here in Sokcho.
The main reason that the northern part of South Korea is such a hot dive area is not the coral, there isn't any, but the fact that visibility here is excellent. On our dive we could see from 15 to twenty meters.
Starting out the day did not look very promising with grey skies and light rain as we headed down to Kings Dive Shop in Yang-Yang to get kitted out and meet our new friend Kim Dong Il who would be our dive master for this trip.
For this trip we headed down to a small village just south of town to a little dive shop, which, amazingly on such a crappy day was positively loaded with divers all getting there gear together for the days activities.
As we helped Dong Il carry our gear to the small dive shop I could not help but feel almost totally out of place with all the other people around. I felt pretty much out of my league here being such a rank beginner but everyone made me feel right at home.
After taking a few minutes to get geared up, putting on our wet suits, booties, and gloves we moved outside to do tank checks and look over all our equipment. This is very important as all this gear we would wear in fifty feet of water would do its best to keep us alive, but only if we double and triple checked it to make sure that everything worked correctly.
After checking our gear we moved towards the dock to board the large Zodiac inflatable that would take us a mile off shore to the dive site.
The guys on the boat were really a bunch of tough guys. Lots of them sported tats, rare in Korea, and you could tell that it would not be very wise to mess with them, but they were really cool, telling me that I looked just like a dive master sitting in front, looking all cool and calm in my wet suit, little did they know that I was pretty damn nervous about making a fool of myself in front of all these professional looking types.
After a good ride through some pretty heavy waves we reached the dive flags and put on our fins, BCD's and masks, and after a few minutes of trouble from the rookie, me, we were ready to head down into the deep.
As I back rolled off the boat I felt a little twinge of panic, "what the hell am I doing, water isn't for humans", but as I deflated my BCD and started to sink all of the old fears drifted away as I was busy equalizing the pressure on my ears, checking my ears, motioning for Dong Il to tighten up my BCD and doing all the usual tasks one has to do to dive safely and before I knew it I bumped my knee into a big kelp covered rock at about forty feet.
The scenery on the bottom was pretty cool and because of the excellent visibility you could see a lot of things. The bottom was a mix of big rocks covered with a ton of seaweed and hard sand bottom. We saw a few fish, a speckled flounder like flatfish, and a really pretty blue one one that was almost neon bright, a ton of cockles, and one pair of old fisherman's pants that Dong Il blue up with compressed air.
After about twenty five minutes our air was pretty used up and we headed up slowly to out gas the nitrogen that had built up in our bodies and finally broke the surface after about forty minutes and bobbed in the ocean waiting for the boat to pick us up.
Pictures-
1. Jason, Kirsty, and Dong Il looking over the gear before our dive
2. Our BCD's with tanks attached ready for our dive
3. Diving is truly an international sport, these dive flags mean the same here as they do everywhere.
4. While on the bottom Dong Il picked up some sea ginseng, "good for health" he told me and urged me to dig in. Chewy and tasting of nothing but salt it was something I tried once, but never again.
5. Our feast spread out before us!