Tantrums and Temples and Totally Ignoring the Obvious.

Poker night yesterday. I lost big time. I lost my money and my ability to walk. Galloping down the stairs, I rolled my ankle heard a few pops. I’d done this before, but not for ten or so years. Ugh. It would be simpler if I didn’t have a job that required pacing around large rooms and stage acrobatics. But now I'm confined to my corner desk, yelling at kids from across the room, getting unwanted sympathy from strangers and doubling my travel-time to get anywhere. I know what you're thinking, "Wow, Andrew, you're life is so tough. What about all the AIDS babies in Africa or the single-mothers working 100-hour weeks to keep food on the table?" Okay, okay. You've pinned me down and slapped my senseless. I am a spoiled infant who didn't get his favorite kind of Gerber. Ignore my tantrum. Pop in your AIDS baby pacifier. I get it.

I went to Gyeongju last weekend and had a blast. Gyeongju is know as the "museum without walls" and I think it lived up to it's name. Museums are normally sardined with smelly tourists, right? I walked through fields of tombs from the old, dead kings of the Shilla dynasty (see right). I forget the dynasty order, but I'm pretty sure these guys are at least 800 years old. We also hit some temples. I think temples and gaudy Buddhas were the real reason I came to Korea. It's just something we don't see at home. Bulguksa (temple ["sa" is the Korean suffix for temple, so to avoid redundancy, I'll just use its Korean name.]) was a theme park. Theme park parking, lines at entrances, crying babies and theme park food and theme park trinkets. My travel buddy, Gray and I searched for ages to find a place to park and finally made our own un-demarcated parking space. We walked in and there was an old pagoda, some gold statues, but, being a temple tourism veteran, I didn't see anything more than typical temple fare. Underwhelmed, we drove through the mountains to the next temple about 30 miles away.


Golgulsa is an operational temple, rather than a theme park, with monks who have a martial arts compound and temple stayers/tourists who want to dip their pinky toe into enlightenment. This temple was a build out of caves and was over 1500 years old. Having a standing temple that old is truly significant in Korea; the Japanese burned down most of the historical sites during their long occupations here. Most temples (like Bulguksa) were burned down and reconstructed as recently as the 1990's. Anyway, the temple was stunning and its entirety was literally carved out of the side of a mountain. (The Buddha to the left is at the top of the mountain and was carved in 500(?) A.D.) Gray and I walked up steep cliffs and sometimes climbed to see little shrines cut out of the face of the stone mountain. During fall, the views were breathtaking. The leaves were starting to change and, growing up in San Diego, I had never seen anything like that before.That night, we drank with these guys from Paris who were studying for their MBAs at a university in Seoul. We had a great time and jawed about off-color topics with off-color humor for hours on end. This is the virtue of living abroad: Everyone's from somewhere else and you never know what you might learn. I learned that the French can be down-to-earth and amicable. I also learned that I have a place to stay in Paris when I visit in a few months. The power of Facebook.

It's been a fun couple of weeks. But, I'm just highlighting the highlights and obscuring the lowlights. I plan on traveling more when my ankle heals up. You'll hear more from me then. Cheers.