Shilluksa Temple

Saturday was a gorgeous fall day. A bit of nip in the air, but nothing a warm fleecy and the radiating sun couldn't fix. We went for a long walk. Yeoju is classified as a very small town, or to some people is just known as the countryside. Even though it's small, it covers a lot of ground (this isn't Blenheim we're talking about). We haven't yet figured out where the city boundaries lie. There is a downtown core and there are several small communities that radiate out from that, all connected by mini-highways. For example, our school is downtown and our apartment complex is one of the smaller communities 4 kilometres away that is tied into the collective city of Yeoju.
There are many parts of town we haven't yet seen and today we had a particular destination in mind. Apparently so did the other 100,000 inhabitants of Yeoju. There is a historical Buddhist temple 45 minutes from our apartment and we walked through downtown, across a very long bridge over the Han River, and through a lovely park that leads up to the temple. Koreans live to walk through parks, it's a very social event to spend the day walking through the park and we joined right in.
This country is graced with mountainscapes in every direction, even in the middle of Seoul you see mountains between all the skyscrapers. Koreans celebrate the harmony between humans and nature. Pagodas are constructed in natural settings as a way for people to gather, but it is the fresh air and the trees and the streams and the flowers that are the real shrines. Nature is a temple onto itself. The architecture is beautiful also and we spent a few hours looking at the different buildings that make up the temple site.
We had to spend hours because we wanted pictures that showed the pristine setting, without hordes of people swarming around us or the buildings. In these pictures, it looks as if we are the only two people here, but we patiently waited for the right moment for the crowds to part before snapping the photos.
We plan on coming back to this temple to partake in what is known as a temple stay, where visitors stay at the temple for 24 hours. You sleep overnight, get up at 3:00 a.m. to meditate with the monks, eat what the monks eat, clean the temple when the monks clean. When was the last time you paid money for a vacation where you were sleep deprived and you had to do housework? It's more for the cultural experience, I guess. But we weren't ready to shave our heads yet, so we're waiting for another time. And a warmer time, because we saw the living quarters and they don't look very conducive to cold weather.