Mar. 7 (Haeinsa Temple: insanely beautiful, insanely insane

Sat 8:54am
Today turned out to be possibly the craziest day so far. Seriously, I felt like I was in National Lampoon's Korean Vacation or something.

The day started off basically as any other day has. I got up and ate breakfast while reading some more of my Einstein biography. About 10:30 rolled around, so I went and woke Kayla up to make sure we were clear on plans for the day. We decided to go to Haeinsa Temple, where the most complete and largest collection of Buddhist scriptures and teachings is kept. We weren't going to leave for an hour or so for lunch and then the temple, so I just kind of relaxed.

Finally the time came when we could start off our journey. We ate a boring meal at our downstairs cafeteria (pretty much every building on campus has one) and headed off to the bus stop. I had researched where we were going and how to get there, so it was fun translating the theory of traveling into the real thing when you have never been there before.

We caught a familiar bus into Daegu and arrived at the train station after about an hour's drive. We hopped on the subway bound for our next bus stop, and it wasn't long before we were at the sobo bus station. We ended up in the station somehow, and were very lucky in that a bus was leaving for the temple in the next ten minutes. So we boarded the bus and awaited our departure.

It was really neat getting the chance to get around for real on our own. We were able to cover a lot of distance without someone who knew korean or korea in general very well. Both of us have a drastic improvement over our attitude towards listening and speaking, it's really pretty great.

The bus departs for the temple, and we make it after about an hour and a half (which is crazy because on the map it didn't look very far away). We successfully made it to the Haeinsa Temple compound thing and were immediately overtaken by a feeling of peace and serenity. They had a smallish museum there, and for about a buck we got to see what was in there. They had lots of buddhist stuff in there, and even some replicas of the buddhist canon they are famous for (for tourist's picture taking).

The museum was just the start of the trek, though, as all the buildings were at least a kilometer away, and it was definitely uphill. The air was pretty cool and very crisp. Much to my surprise, and quite a nice twist of fate, the air was actually very similar to the air back home. Instead of a heavy, strange city air which bogs you down, it was clean, clear, and it put me in a good mood.

We made it to the Temple itself pretty easily. It was so beautiful. The buildings were absolutely stunning, and the painting underneath the roofs of them were gorgeously bright. There was a really interesting mix of historic atmosphere with religious tension there that is hard to put into words. It was almost like I could feel an unseen energy pulsing through me as I walked through it.
The main attraction, the Buddhist canon, was really neat. It was housed in its own special room at the top of the temple (which also means the holiest part). You couldn't take pictures of them, but when I saw Koreans breaking out the cameras, I had to snap one too. The shrines were absolutely beautiful, and the people there worshipping seemed as if they were in a trance. All in all, the place was breathtaking. I only regret that we hadn't enough time to look at the entire place. It started getting dark as we left the temple, so we decided to head back.

This may seem like the part where the story drops off, because the objective of the day has been reached, we got there without incident, and we were heading back. WRONG.

So we march back down the mountain, casually joking all the while, that since it's six o clock, the buses probably don't even run. What a funny joke. Too bad it turned out to be true. When we went back down, all the little vendors and everything had closed up shop and the only signs of life were two buses parked by the main pavilion area. We went up and asked the guy if they were going to Sobo, our bus station in Daegu. He immediately looked worried, and dashed off, talking to other worried looking guys.
That seemed a little strange, I thought. He rushes back to us, and in broken english explains he isn't going into Daegu. Ok, we say, no problem, we will just wait for another bus. That worried the guy even more, and he dashed off again, this time bringing back an order to follow him into the first bus.
On the first bus, there was a guy with a microphone standing up talking to the passengers. The worried looking man spoke to him, and he had a look like, "Are you kidding? Really?" It took a second more of unintelligible korean banter before the guy, looking slightly agitated, motions for us to sit in the first seat. This wasn't bad, I thought. these seats were special though, in that in getting the privilege of sitting there, one also got the privilege of holding all the trash of the bus. The worried man explains to us something about Daegu and highway, so I thank him a lot and try and get comfortable amongst the trash.
The bus (which we didn't pay for) started off and microphone guy starts singing. The lights get dim and he is just singing away, when Kayla recognizes that we're on a bus with built in Karaoke. It was then that I realized how unusual it was for them to give us a ride. They were a buddhist tour group (I knew they were buddhist because I saw many of them praying in shrines) who were now on their way back home from some sort of pilgrimage thing, and we were definitely just a couple of foreign hitch hikers.
So there we are, literally vagabonds on this bus, while microphone guy sings his heart out. We are offered soft drinks and try to get comfortable, when microphone guy offers for me to sing a song. With a little hesitation I accepted, and because I felt hurried and couldn't find a nice sounding song to sing, I sang "When I'm Gone" by Three Doors Down. I felt like a stupid American, because all the songs microphone guy sang were pretty and had to do with love. I sang a rock song. Boo me. Kayla got to sing one though, too, and got to pick Manic Monday by the Bangles (turns out I missed the majority of nice songs by a page turn), which was a nice change from my song.
When our songs were over, everyone clapped and cheered, and me and Kayla were having a blast on the bus. Microphone guy just kept singing and would come up to our little trash haven and dance with us. What a time it was. They even offered us food, and we had some neat rice cakes with bean paste in them. Boy were they tasty. Nothing in the world could ruin the way home.
Right as the thought of how great a trip we were having went through my head, traffic slowed down a little. Taking stock of what was going on around me, I noticed we were in a different lane than everyone else. At the same time, I see and hear the bus door open up and the driver says something to microphone guy. He takes the info, seems to curl it around in his brain a moment, and says to us, "This is the Highway outside of Daegu. Get a Taxi." Upon his last word, he used the international signal for please step off my bus.
Shocked, we grabbed our things and walked off the bus, getting a nice round of clapping and waving bye. So we stepped out onto the shoulder of the busy freeway and the bus drove off.

There we were. Kicked off our karaoke bus and left to fend for ourselves on the freeway. It was insane. We had to time sprints up on-ramps and other places where there was virtually no shoulder with an absence was cars. After what seemed like an eternity, we made it into Daegu, though. The only bad part of actually making it into Daegu is that I'm pretty sure that when people said, Don't go there at night, or Don't go alone, or Daegu can have bad parts of town. That was what they meant. It looked like I was in the Korean version of American Gangster. Needless to say, we power-walked it to the nearest bus stop, no telling how far away. Luckily the bus stop had a bus that took us to another stop that we could catch a bus back to campus. If we had been any later, the buses would have stopped running and we would have been in a bad way.

It was a crazy trip, and probably one of the more eye opening ones so far. Once again, I want to stress how nice the average person is here in Korea, after all, they let us hitchhike in their very nice chartered bus. Something else I learned: Koreans of all ages love Karaoke.

On a serious note it was wonderful seeing the Temple today. It was a UNESCO World Heritage sight, which means that it's deemed one of the most important places in the world, just like Stonehenge. Preserving treasures like that for future generations is very important, since, as a famous man once said, we can never know where we're going until we find out where we came from.

Until next time

Aron Huckaba Internatonal Vagabond