Where do monks learn to drive?

By coincidence, I followed up my metropolitan whirl with something close to Korea's other extreme: a templestay. Monday, some friends and I spent a couple hours on a couple buses to head due east to Golgulsa Temple to check out the Buddhist way of life. Twenty-four hours of meditation, martial arts, yoga, vegetarian meals, hiking, chanting, and way more floor-sitting than my body's equipped to gracefully do at the moment. All this in a pristine mountainside temple dating to the 6th century. Pretty amazing.

We almost got on the wrong bus to Gyeong-ju (yes, it's a theme - part being a unknowing foreigner, part just being myself in any country) but managed to get thing straightened out before actually boarding. From Gyeong-ju, the directions say to take a city bus another 40 minutes to a certain stop - but if you're going, best enlist a local's help. The bus announcement for the place is decidedly different, they don't stop unless you ask, and you'll never see the stop marked on the road. If you successfully make it off the bus (we were only 50 meters or so past the place when the bus screeched to a halt as our helper shouted down the driver), you'll find yourself in the middle of the country at a random road with no clear signs for this historic spot, your only directions to "walk 15 minutes."

Those were 15 long minutes, lemme tell ya, trudging single-file along the road (which we hoped was the right direction), past fields and a small town and countryfolk giving us quizzical stares. But we finally spotted some signs for the temple (only in Korean though ... the temple's tourist-friendly reach is pretty much confined to its grounds) and knew we had arrived.

Despite the lack of worldly announcement, the temple is quite a grand place - maybe a couple dozen buildings ancient and new scattered along a gorgeous and quite vertical mountainside. I'd guess there were maybe 25 monks and monks-in-training in residence (a couple of them Western) plus a handful of Western twenty-somethings living there in a two-year training course for sunmudo - a form of martial arts. Monk fashion includes natural-dyed grey and brown robes, shaved heads and accessories of simple glasses and watches. The sunmudo trainees wear a certain loose-fitting pant and regular T-shirts. Then there were maybe 20 of us there for the templestay, and upon arriving, we were given orange vests - kind of like a Buddhist take on prison garb.

The templestay program goes on daily, with visitors staying anywhere from hours to days, and the schedule changing a bit from day to day. The time is basically broken into regular strenuous or culturally interesting activities separated by fairly long stretches of free time to rest, hike, meditate or just contemplate the beautiful surrounds. here typically is a service element to every day - cleaning or weeding or building, for example - but I think that since we were there for Chusok, the schedule was devoted more to holiday ceremonies instead.

In the evening we ate dinner a la Korean Buddhist custom - men and women sitting separately, quietly. Nothing can be thrown out, but you can get seconds. I definitely don't have a handle on the Buddhist approach to food, however: According to Buddhism, you're supposed to focus on your food and be grateful for it, yet eat for sustenance rather than pleasure. As everything's vegetarian and simple, yet fresh and delicious - it was some of the best Korean food I've eaten, and I had a hard time with the not-enjoying-it-too-much concept. I definitely could stand to eat less food mindlessly, but I think that tenant alone could keep me from converting - not to mention the whole Buddha business - the world is just too full of delicious things to savor.

After dinner was an couple hours of chanting (always accompanied by plenty of full-bodied bowing), a brief meditation (as in sitting straight-backed in the lotus-position, hands encircled in front of your navel, eyes closed, "ohm"ing and hissing), sunmudo training (ouch, ouch and double-ouch - those monks are amazingly fit people) and a demonstration of traditional Korean dance by a local university professor. This was all supposed to be an outdoor moonlit ceremony to observe the holiday, but drizzly weather unfortunately moved it indoors. Then to bed to prepare for an early morning - the men were divided into a few rooms and women all shared a large common room, everyone sleeping Korean style (with mats on the floor), but the mats here were more like a folded-over blanket.

Korean Buddhists believe that the karmatic power of the universe begins to awaken around 4 a.m. and that the morning is a particularly potent time for reflection, so chanting and meditation was slated for 5 a.m. Apparently some of the Korean women in our room believe that 4 a.m. is a particularly potent time for fixing their hair, because they started rustling around 3:45. Not having a clock at my bedside, I was up and dressed before I realized the hour, so I slipped out into the dark for a quiet starlit stroll, or so I thought.

Unfortunately one of the many temple dogs - kept to ward off evil spirits - apparently decided I was a demon on the loose, and the two of us managed to rouse an even larger crowd. A sleepy-eyed German (or something like that) emerged on the scene of me standing petrified in front of the snarling mutt, and we had a most delightful conversation something like this:

(German speaks to dog, who lowers volume of growl.)
Me: I'm sorry! I just wanted to take a walk.
German: Don't be afraid! She senses your fear. DON'T BE AFRAID!
Me: Um ... okay. (Thinking: Yeah right. You come down here and stare down this ferocious thing and DON'T BE AFRAID!)
(German speaks again to dog, who finally goes silent.)
German: It is early.
Me: I know.
German: 5 o'clock. You come here.
Me: I know. I just wanted to take a walk. (pointing to trail)
German: On mountain?
Me: Yes.
German: It is early.
Me: I know.
German: (stares at me for a moment, then finally shrugs shoulders at the weird American) Be careful.
Me: I will.

(German goes back inside and I start up the path, walking away from the dog I'll note. But as soon as I take a few steps the dog breaks into snarls and growls again and starts tearing after me.)
Me: Okay! Okay! I give up already!

I edged back around the building and down the mountain, muttering all the way about stupid dogs.

Turns out that maybe that dog was good karma though in disguise, because instead of stumbling around on a dark hiking trail with little to see except some burial mounds, I headed over to the other side of the mountain (assiduously watching for signs of any other spirit-keeping dogs) for a closer look at the ancient Buddha carved into a rockface above the main temple. It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done, creeping up crumbling footholds in a dewy rock wall in the pre-dawn, but the payoff was worth it - stupid dog and all. The monks had started their morning chants and a soft light pulsed out from the elaborate temple below; hushed droning and percussion wafted up with a hint of incense on the cool breeze. A star-studded sky sprawled above, and the verdant Korean mountains were spread out before me, occasional lights illuminating a misty valley here and there. And at my back, a 4-meter serene-faced sculpture - pounded into a mountainside by Indian Buddhists who had migrated to Korea about the time the Dark Ages were setting in upon Europe. This is traveling.

I had to book it down to morning chanting, then we had an elaborate yet pious breakfast ceremony for the holiday. Awhile later was tea with the grandmaster, a warm and graceful man with a deep-belly laugh that reminded me of the way one of those jovial Buddha statues might laugh if it came to life (though the grandmaster had none of those statues' girth). In my limited experience with Buddhist culture, it seems to me that the faith tends to emphasize a docile sort of humor - kind of like how Christianity has its own version of standup-style jokes, I suppose. Later was more chanting and then a Chusok ceremony celebrating growth and life and the lives gone before us, which basically involved a lot more bowing and some chanting and a table full of harvest goods. People come to the table two by two to symbolically empty cups of water into a communal bowl, then hold the cups as monks pour them full anew.

Then another tasty meal. And for our final adventure, the couple of my group who remained crammed into a small, rickety van with a questionable clutch and an even more eye-raising driver - a monk. I haven't even seen taxis here pull some of the stunts this guy managed ... and I had to wonder where monks learn to drive. Or maybe because they're religious, Korea just gives them a free pass to the road. Anyway, our fabulous guide (in full monk attire, of course) successfully shuttled 12 of us tourists to several other historic Buddhist sites in the area and explained the culture and history in broken but extremely animated English. A Brit in the group bought everyone ice cream at the journey's end, including one for our monk, of course. I'm not sure where ice cream fits in with the whole take on food, but our guide gratefully accepted, and it was really heartwarming to see someone's eyes light up that much at what seems such a little thing.

The trip home took an extra hour because of holiday traffic, and seemed even longer for the lack of sleep and soreness of body, but there's no question it was worth it. Templestay: $40. Bus fares: $11. Incidental tourism costs: $3. Experiences ... well, you know.

Korea's got Seoul

Belated Chuseok (also spelled Chusok) greetings - Korea's rough equivalent to Thanksgiving. We had six days off, including the weekend, and I spent a good chunk of that time traversing the Korean capital and remembering what it is to be a tourist.

Thankfully my cohorts for the trip like playing tour guide, so they did most of the footwork and I just got to go along for the ride - one of my favorite ways to travel. Through trial and error, and probably just the virtue of getting older and more cantankerous, I'm finding that there are two ways I like to travel: solo and largely by the seat of my pants, or tagging along on others' agendas. I'm just not a natural organizer, nor do I like to be responsible for other people's happiness - especially in situations/places I don't know intimately. Thankfully there are some of you out there who don't get stressed out by that sort of thing - who actually enjoy travel planning for groups or do it as a career - or I'd never travel with anyone.

Anyway, two co-workers were bound for the big city this weekend with a priority set in line with mine: finding cheap accommodations, good ethnic food (not Korean or Western, the two types readily available in Daegu), doing some shopping, some sightseeing, and checking out the nightlife and foreigner districts. All with the understanding that we're here for at least a year and will almost certainly be in the city again, so no need to rush any of it.

Once we finally got to Seoul - another adventure on mass transit, where we managed to get on the slow train instead of the bullet train (so maybe I shouldn't have been following so blindly right then) - we found a vastly different world from Daegu. So many of the things I'd thought were probably just very Korean - the stares you get as a foreigner, the loud ads plastered haphazardly everywhere, the non-discriminatory palates - I now think are more a product of a slower-developing economy in my "small town" of 2.5 million. Although still of course quite Korean, Seoul feels more like a big city anywhere else in the world - quaint shopping areas, more homelessness (though nothing compared to the average U.S. city), hopping nightlife, polished entertainment, and just a cosmopolitan sensibility pervading the whole place. And far more international. There was one particularly poignant moment when we were eating Italian food, listening to American pop music and swapping Spain experiences in Spanish with our South American waitress ... of course in Korea.

And it was super strange feeling like I didn't have to acknowledge every Westerner who crossed my path. Here in Daegu, it's a fairly odd occurrence to see someone who looks like me, and I always find myself staring just as the Koreans do, then smiling and nodding hello. In Seoul, nearly every subway car you catch will have at least one or two others. (Funny note: Today back in Daegu, a little girl shouted to her parents "Chinese people!" when another American and I entered their elevator.)

On the tourist front, we had a highly successful stay - hitting a couple palaces, a changing-of-the-guard ceremony, the foreigner district, the kitschy shopping area, a traditional market, a gargantuan mall, and a bar that seemed to be the Korean male version of "Coyote Ugly" with pyrotechnics. We also had Indian cuisine, Italian, Egyptian, Chinese dumplings and plenty of street yummies.

We also found an awesome hostel, Stay Korea (www.staykorea.co.kr), run by a Korean woman who's fluent in French and English and her Korean husband. A double room was about $50 a night, and a spot in the dorm was about $15. For those not acquainted with the hostel system, they come in all sorts, but the basic idea is that they are cheap places to sleep - often in a common room with bunkbeds. You never really know what you're getting, because the crowd can be vastly different day to day even if the place checks out OK, but in general I've found them one of the best parts of traveling, both for the cost and the chance to meet interesting people.

This time, we found ourselves in a remarkably clean, quiet house four minutes' walk from a subway and a few blocks from the happening university district of restaurants, shops and bars. The owners actually pick you up from the subway stop on your arrival and offer all sorts of sightseeing advice - not to mention friendly conversation. The dorm was silent and dark, the double room was basic but quite sufficient, there was a lovely patio and roof deck perfect for drinking tea and watching the neighborhood - a friend and I stayed there up into the wee hours one night talking politics and religion with a globe-trotting French pharmacist.

All in all, a fabulous trip. Never did find the"Korea's got Seoul" T-shirt, though - a friend in Colorado has one from the year she taught here, and pun-loving copy editor that I am, I rather liked it ... wonder if it was some sort of tourism-department slogan that's fallen by the wayside. Oh well, maybe next trip I'll find one.

Soon to come: a Buddhist templestay.

So what have you learned about your travel style, dear readers? Feel free to post your answer in the "Comments" section below.

Chestnuts growing in an open field ...

Harvesting chestnuts is a four-appendaged sport. Or so I learned during this weekend's cultural outing - a day of activities at a "folk village" north of Daegu (kind of like Iowa's Amana Colonies but much simpler and smaller).

For anyone who didn't know (like me, before today), chestnuts grow inside fist-sized masses of thorns, which turn brown and thunk to the ground when ripe. Getting these well-armed bundles to give up their hearts is a prickly task. You'll need one hand to hold a sack, two well-soled feet to stop the thing into submission and then nimbly pry it open, and a surgeon's hand to go in after the innards. This of course while dodging the tree's attempts to pelt down more thorny fruit at the intruder.

I probably could have seen the process even in Colorado, but it's so much cooler to do my stomping-prying-extraction dance on a rainy gravel lane half a world away, listening to bleating goats and amusing a wizened Korean farmer leaning on a rake. Maybe that's why people travel ... not necessarily to make more memories but simply to tie them to more exotic incidentals. Plus, odds are that I wouldn't have hit any chestnut groves in the foreseeable future in Colorado.

And it's pretty neat to have a better understanding of the process behind what ends up on your plate - or palate. As far as I was concerned, the woody, autumnal treat simply materialized on city streets half-roasted. (By the way, that's not my picture - it's copied from an educational website with a clause allowing such use.)

Despite an unyielding downpour, we also:

• picked apples,
• dyed handkerchiefs with onion, ash-tree and soil dyes,
• ate a farm-fresh meal,
• made Korean rice dumplings,
• saw a traditional wedding ceremony (a couple from Iowa got mock re-hitched), and
• stomp-danced with the old women to a medley of traditional rhythm instruments.

All in all, an awesome day sponsored entirely by Daegu city tourism.

It's amazing the amount of money Korea is pouring into reaching out to the world, especially to Westerners. That event, which has been at least an annual occurrence for some years now, included buses, food and materials for about 120 people - not to mention labor costs. There were all sorts of nationalities there, including the first Spanish speakers I've chanced upon in Asia - a Mexican couple in government work. (My Spanish has obviously rotted away, by the way - eeks.)

And Friday, we went to a cultural expo back at Gyeong-ju, the historic city with the tombs east of here (see this post for ramblings from my earlier visit to other parts of the town). The government also keeps systematically pouring money into that expo center, constructing modern architecture, sponsoring cutting-edge exhibits that blend millenniums of culture with futuristic animation, and drawing performers from the world over.

And let's not forget that my existence here is largely on the government's tab, too. As I understand it, the Village we were hired to run is essentially city-funded to educate a broad swath of the city's kids - plus eventually serve as part of a large-scale attraction area north of the city with resorts, an amusement park and who knows what else. Organizers hope to break even through weekend events and special sessions, but the main portion of the state-of-the-art venture is dedicated to public education.

But it's not only the government pouring money into global ties - it's a whole culture. There are legions of expats here teaching English at all manor of institutions, most of them private firms funded by Korean parents hoping for global opportunities for their children. English competence is seen as a source of power, though Korean children are also fully expected to value their cultural heritage. There's much still that I don't understand about that balance, but it works largely in my favor.

a-ha moment

Every so often when you're learning a new subject, you hit those times when you realize you already know more than you thought. Like when you're playing the guitar and realize an E chord is simply an A minor one string up. Or when you learn how electron patterns repeat throughout the periodic table.

In Korean, it's pretty freaking cool when you start reading Hangul efficiently enough that you realize how much of at least the commercial signage is based off English words. Hence, I suddenly can order an "orenjee ju-suh," catch a "boos-uh," watch "tel-lebeejon," wear a "suweto," use a "compyooto," tell people I'm not from "Kae-na-da."

Just like in Spanish, bunches of English words have been appropriated and squashed into native sounds (Koreanized) ... you just have to know what to look and listen for. Often, it's mostly absent "R's" and an "-uh" or "-ee" sound attached to the end of a word. (In fact, I'm quickly picking up the nickname "Mahshy.") It all gives me an even deeper appreciation for English-language learners who by and large have no such quick fixes. I will never be fluent in Korean, but I think I just jumped a lightyear toward that goal by simply learning how to recognize words from my own language.

new digs and other mundane updates

Whew! Finally have my own Internet connection again. We rather suddenly moved into dorms at the end of last week, and it's been a bit like starting over again: new digs, new roommates, new part of town, new transportation lines, new set of shopkeepers ... but the biggest challenge - no personal line to the Net again for a few days. I am a part of the wired generation, no doubt about it.

But anyway, I'm now happily settled - Web and all - in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom suite on the top floor of a four-story brand new dorm building about 10 minutes' walk from the college. My roommates are fabulous folk: a chill couple from Ohio - new grads from an ESL master's program - and a former junior high math teacher from Colorado Springs. I have a Western-style bed again, and out my window is an undeveloped plot of tiny, haphazard houses and squash blossoms. The rooms are actually built for two each, which I can hardly imagine, but the place is grand for our setup of four people. And we only share a washer among 12 people now, and it's on our balcony, rather than down five flights in a dingy basement of a busy hotel.

As of now, we're supposed to be here another six weeks or so before moving up to the Village, but I'll find shoes in Asia if that deadline actually holds. We're taking another trip up there tomorrow and we'll see how much closer the crews are to the lavish architects' drawings ... it will be an amazing place if it turns out anything close to that, but it's obviously got a lot yet to get there.

Meahwhile it's an adventure navigating the neighborhood's maze of tiny alleyways and major "a la NASCAR" streets. We're also within minutes of another, large university, and there's a cool area closeby teeming with cosmopolitan restaurants, shops and nightlife. Downtown is now a bus- or cabride away, instead of mere stops on the convenient subway, but the sense of local community is captivating.

Amid trips to E-mart this weekend, the country's semi-equivalent to Wal-Mart/Target, a group of us squeezed in a full day touring the coastal part of this region by bus - stopping at a park, a temple, an arboretum and a windmill field. Nothing jaw-dropping, but fun nonetheless, and for $25 bucks for the day (sans lunch), the price was definitely right. Plus it was nice to be out in the countryside for a bit and also more along the tourist routes, where English signs at least are more plentiful. Thankfully fall appears to have finally hit, and ever since the days of rain it's been mild and breezy - hopefully we've got a couple months of this weather before winter rolls in, because it's fantastic. I'm planning an overnight to Seoul and a templestay for a break later this month, and we're hitting two cultural expos this weekend - one on the college's tab as "cultural training" and a thank-you from the dean for teaching summer camp.

Speaking of work, we've finally gotten to the point of breaking down a lot of our planning into task forces, and it's nice to get our hands on tasks and see measurable progress. Plus we've been rethinking some of the curriculum and coming up with really cool activities and projects ... I can hardly wait to get into the Village and put it into practice. I feel so spoiled, getting into the cool part of education by skipping all the typical bureaucracy and limited school systems. Granted, we'll have our limits, too, but the support and materials we have to work with are AMAZING, and there's no need to teach for any standardized test - the only test is whether students enjoy themselves and get a little more comfortable with English.

That's about the wrap for now, I think. Love from Korea! :)

TPR 101

Today was the day I've been waiting for. After a week of unyielding rain, the skies had at least temporarily plugged up and left the city in a temperate haze. Okay, so maybe not quite the perfect conditions for trying out my newest Korean small talk: "Nashiga chosumnida" ("Nice weather"). But tomorrow could very well be back to steaming or more rain ... so my next shot could be in April - heck if I wasn't going to bust it out.

Pay attention class, this is an example of education giant James Asher's Total Physical Response theory (basically that language should be learned in physical, real-world scenarios) in action:

It starts at breakfast, when I "Nashiga chosumnida" the attendant. Then the maid washing the windows on the way out of the hotel. I "Nashiga chosumnida" the bus driver (whose English is improving a lot more quickly than my Korean), and the linguistic-major Romanians within earshot giggle. The lunch ladies. I make a special "Nashiga chosumnida" outing during break, delivering the day's weather report to a handful of shops near the college.

Nashiga nashiga nashiga. Asher's got nothing on me. Bring it on, baby - I'll "Nashiga chosumnida" this whole country before the rain returns.

And in good Korean fashion, they all smile and nod, more or less amused with the crazy American who's suddenly decided to turn meteorologist.

Or at least that's what I think they're smiling at ...

Funny, no one seems to be returning with the "Yes, that's right" statement on my recording ... don't they know the script? Am I in the right country? ... Hmm. Better pocket this one for now until I can hit a dictionary or talk to someone to get a translation ...

And upon further investigation, it appears that I have in fact been telling everyone something to the effect of "You good pigeon." Or perhaps "Your sister's grandson well."

Friggin' Asher.

Oh well, it's supposed to rain tomorrow.

the art of karaoke

I'm just gonna have to get into this stuff. Having returned from my third such outing in the past two weeks, it's clear that a good Korean social life absolutely requires a solid education in Righteous Brothers, Outkast and Britney Spears. Not that I wasn't friendly with these fine folk before - it's just that my American acquaintanceship ain't gonna cut it. I need words, I need actions, I need to know their motivation ... and there will be a test.

Karaoke. It's where the 8-year-old crooning to the hairbrush emerges from the classy businesswoman, where the inner rock star pumps out from the dignified middle-aged gent.
Karaoke. Where there are no observers and no poring over of songbooks ("This is not a library!") - so you better come prepared.
Karaoke. Home of the peanut-butter dried squid and other assorted snacks, bad beer and soju.
When in Korea, karaoke.

I'm still getting over the oddness of presenting this ridiculousness to an intimate roomful of friends 4 feet from you rather than a distant bar of people you'll never have to see again ... but I better get with the program: True karaokers are a fierce foe, armed with tambourines and microphones. You will sing, you will dance, you will cheer riotously for everyone and you will be scored. (Seriously, the program actually gives you a score based mostly on how loud you are, best as I can figure.)

Pitch is not a necessary element whatsoever. Rythym is negligible. But flair and good humor, those are absolute essentials. And a true socialite has a little of everything in the hopper and knows just what makes an Elton John moment versus a time for the Black Eyed Peas.

So who has suggestions for my repertoire?