Saturday we got a phone call from one of the Korean teachers, Claudia. One of her friends had invited her and her husband, James, to participate in a temple stay. A temple stay is where you go to a Buddhist temple and see how the monks live. Claudia's friend asked her to invite any foreign friends she had, so we jumped at the chance and invited our friends along as well. So at around 5PM on Saturday a van arrived to pick the six of us up and we heading to JiJang temple.
We were greeted by the monks and Claudia's friend. We found out her friend's husband was the monk who owned the temple. We also found out there was a news crew staying at the temple for the weekend!
First, we were given some clothes to wear. We looked pretty funny because they were a little small and.. well.. yeah you can see the picture of Tara, Christy, and Andrew on the right. That was about the time the 'interviews' began.
This was kind of strange. They wanted to interview on camera throughout our stay for the news program. Tara mentioned it felt like we were on some reality TV program. It ended up being pretty fun and we had a lot of laughs.
After dressing up we headed to the temple for some kind of ceremony. Not exactly sure what it was but there was a lot of bowing involved. Or what seemed like a lot of bowing at the time. There were about 20 other people there, mostly children and high school students. They were also there for the temple stay.
Next they served us dinner, and we ate our food according to how traveling monks would eat. When monks travel (we were told) they only brought four bowls, chopsticks, a spoon, and a kerchief. The bowls fit into one another and were wrapped together with the chopsticks and spoon using the kerchief. Because the monk would use these bowls for many days in a row, there was a procedure for how to set-up the bowls, serve the food, eat the food, and clean the bowls afterwards.
The food was quite good and, of course, we were interviewed about the food. The kids who were there were apparently quite good at the drums, so after dinner we were treated to a drum show. The kids were really cute to watch, and afterwards we had a chance to play the drums. Again, we were interviewed about the drums. For those of you who see this part of the video, try not to laugh. I was trying my best to speak in a way they could translate and stop from laughing at the same time. It came out kind of strange and for some reason it made it on the news.
After the performance we went back to the temple were we had a short yoga class, and then sang some songs around a camp fire. Between the six of us we couldn't think of an English song to sing, but somehow, after a lot of urging from the Korean children, we ended up singing "Lean on Me". I believe it was Tara's idea... she even had a little dance to go along with the song. Unfortunately the dance never made it onto the news... could have been a hit.
At the campfire we found out that the monk and the high school students were going to Canada for a couple of weeks. So after the fire we sat down and talked with them for a while. It is kind of funny to see the perceptions people have about Canada.
Around 11 we went to sleep... barely, only to be awakened by the monks at 4am. We trudged out of bed and, this was pretty cool, we got to ring a giant (2m) bell. Next we went to the temple and just sort of followed along in whatever they were doing. We first bowed and bowed for what seemed like an hour (we found out later it was 108 times... all the way up and down), then faced a partner and bowed to them for a good 5 or 10 minutes. During this time we were being interviewed and asked to act tired for the camera. Must have not done a very good job acting cause it was cut from the news.
Sunday was kind of hazy because of the lack of sleep, but we had breakfast (similar to the dinner actually) and then went for a walk. The walk was nice as it had been snowing all night. It's really different in Korea: there are lots of 'green spaces' and hills covered with trees but you can pretty much always see major power lines or a big highway. Or a military base. Well anywhere we have been anyway.
On the way back from the walk we had a staged snowball fight. Which was actually pretty fun because I can't really remember having an actual snowball fight since grade 4 or 5 when they deemed snowballs to be too dangerous.
When we got back to the temple we hopped on a bus and were taken to an organic strawberry farm. This was pretty amazing. They let us loose in the greenhouse and told us to eat as much as we want. Being fresh fruit starved English teachers we interpreted this as "as much as we can" and proceeded to gorge ourselves with strawberries. They were the tastiest strawberries I have had since we used to grow them in our garden at home. Of course we were interviewed here as well, with Tara and I doing one scene where we kind of poke our heads above the strawberries and make it look like we were really enjoying the strawberries.... yeah it didn't make the cut.
Well, fame has it's price, and after we got back we had to do some 're-shoots' cause some video didn't turn out or something like that. So we went through the drum performance again, and had to re-enact arriving at the temple.... all for 30 seconds of news footage. We were all exhausted after this and we thanked our hosts and headed back to Daejeon.
The show made it on the 7am news on KBS, for January 31st. I am trying to get my hands on a CD copy, but if you really are interested you can watch it on the KBS website. You first need to register here, then the video is here. Just click the little TV icon beside 7:00-8:00. There are two short commercials then there is an hour long newscast. Fast forward to 43:00. Enjoy. Laugh, but not too much.
