Daring escape plans
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
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3
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Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Seoul,
Korea Rep.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
It didn't take long for the novelty of the penthouse to wear off. Guests came by to marvel at the enormity and emptiness of the place, and to patronise the only bar in town. But after one night in the penthouse they were ready to leave, as was I. So I began hatching weekly escape plans; every weekend a new adventure, the country bumpkin dusting off his Sunday finest and venturing off into town.
The week of quarientation did at least yield some rather excellent companionship
moments before bow #1
. United in our isolation, I met the people who would become my hosts or guests every week thereafter. We visit, bearing the necessary gifts, we venture out for a night on the town (whichever town it might be), looking our rock star best. We come home and sometimes someone passes out on the penthouse floor. Or they throw up in the trash can.And in between the decadent rock star evenings there are periods of tranquillity and beauty. Like spending a night in a Buddhist temple, poised up in the cool green of the mountains. A rare vegetarian haven in a country that hasn't yet discovered animal welfare.
The temples have passed out of the era of their glorious past. Today monks take the fast train across the country, talk on cellphones, watch satellite TV in their quarters. When they are out and about no one gives them a second look - they are far less interesting than foreigners with piercings - but within the temple complex, shades of the past remain, and every monk is revered as a man close to god.
Foreigners are welcome to come and stay at the temple nowadays. They are even forgiven when they forget to bow or cannot recite the correct syllables of a mantra. But they do participate in temple life. In the evening they learn to meditate, all creaking knees and awkward postures. Many have given up any hope of enlightenment long before the monk tones the end of the session.
And in the morning they are woken at 4am by the sound of a hollow wood block and a single chanting voice
temple accommodation
. They bow as they enter the temple, and take their cushions under the benevolent gazes of a thousand tiny reflective buddhas, great wooden dragons bellowing out of the canopies above them. They follow the lead of the diminutive monks, bowing with hand together, dropping to their knees, pressing their foreheads to the floor. It is a surprisingly refreshing way to start the day, an expression of reverence that involves the body as much as the mind.And then the monks all file out, save one, who stays to lead us through the ritual 108 morning bows before breakfast. All together, dropping to our knees, pressing foreheads to the ground, rising, dropping to our knees, pressing...
In what feels like the afternoon but is actually mid-morning the same monk, now clad in fashionable outdoor gear leads us - clad in our white temple pyjama ensembles - up into the mountains behind the temple. Perhaps the time of their greatest influence has passed but the monks still enjoy the best real estate in Korea, each temple situated at a site of particular peace and beauty. A stream purrs over great smooth stones, and ramshackle towers of pebbles line the path, each one a prayer offered up by some pilgrim.
Later on another hike above another temple we come upon a great bronze Buddha, that has turned the same shade of green as the forest. It is a beautiful image in the way that all these serene Buddhas are, bestowing the blessings and gesturing profoundly through the centuries. The piles of prayer are much bigger here, the temple is the same combination of old traditions and new developments.
The weekend after the templestay was Chuseok, which is translated as Korean thanksgiving; a five day long weekend when the locals all go home to spend time with their families, gorging themselves even more than usual
temple at 4am
. It is also a time when lost and lonely foreigners descend in droves on Seoul, looking for company and slippers in their size.Four of us country folk ventured up to the big city. And we would have been pretty much lost from the moment we stepped off the train if it weren't for the couple of savvy locals we knew. Seoul has no centre and no downtown, it has no grid structure, just a great tangle of metro network that sprawls for hours in every direction, snaring surrounding cities in its maze. It has no time for any of these luxuries, so fast is it growing and expanding and progressing; there are more pressing matters at hand, people to house and money to be made.
Here was that endless city I had been imagining prior to arrival; 10+ million people dwelling in studio apartments, hailing cabs, talking on cellphones and still finding the time to eat with chopsticks. It is a breath-taking place.
With its population thinned due to the holiday, Seoul became temporarily navigable, and we the hungry foreigners made good use of this lull. We invaded shopping precinct after precinct, from traditional market to megamall, searching for shoes, teaching aides, cheese, hamburgers and other indulgences unavailable in the countryside. And at every available moment we crammed ourselves full of 'western' food - pizza, fries, burgers, pasta, sandwiches, curries. 'no Korean food' was a mantra of the weekend. And by the time we returned to the sticks, pickled cabbage was suddenly tasting fantastic again.
There was no time for tourism
the bronze buddha
. There was only the frantic consuming of our first paycheques, paid early for the holiday. Occassionally a historical site would reveal itself though. The monumental old south gate of Seoul thing with a roof like great beating wings, standing ancient and impressive, surrounded by traffic and highrise. It is amazing how much history and culture has managed to survive in Seoul, given the reckless, merciless pace of progress here....But then in the depths of night, after a long evening sampling the glamour and quirks of one of the university neighbourhoods, an altogether otherworldly sight; our taxi soaring along the expressway high above Seoul, and the city completely black below and around us, save for the ghostly red or blue neon crosses of the city's many churches. Colourful beacons in a sea of smoggy night-time gloom, sometimes ten or fifteen crosses glowing in a single direction. A strange sign of Seoul's eastern- western composite identity, and a reminder of the human lives - the fears and loves and faiths - that lie buried beneath the highrise and within the steel and glass, that still need to turn the lights off to sleep, but leave the night lights on.
There have been other daring escape plans hatched and executed by me, and there will be many more. Visits to the old Baekje kingdom, a field trip to Everland amusement park, and a trip down south for the Pusan International Film Festival; every weekend and as often as not, during the week, Korea is showing strange new sides of itself to me. I am constantly forced to update my vocabulary of adjectives to described the people the food the language and customs the environments. Stay tuned for many more garbled attempts to do justice to this strange strange country...
