- Japan broke, so Dina and I live in Korea now.
- We live in Gimhae.
- We buy food at the night market. and eat kimbap.
- "Gimhae" sounds like a mix between "Gimme" and "Kimmy." It's a small town in the hills, a suburb of Busan.
- Busan is also Pusan. It's a big town in the hills.
- Aquariums are everywhere, but their denizens are for food. We have hatched many plans to rescue the lot of them and release them into the wild, but the plans remain unexecuted.
It takes about an hour to get to Busan by bus. This might seem like it's a long time, but the bus rides are very entertaining. The drivers like to go 100km/h in 50km/h zones. When the light is red, they slow down to about 70. This creates a sensation of stomach-and-heart-in-throat, and the hour goes by quickly.
There is a lot to do in Busan. It's a pretty huge city -- second largest in Korea. The subway system is excellent and easy to navigate, with English maps and announcements on all the trains. Every step away from the subway station, though, is an adventure, because there are no maps or street names -- in English or in Korean. The streets are crooked and crowded, often sidewalkless. The adventure that has prompted me to write at last was a trek to
Seokbulsa.
Although we spent November participating in (and winning)
NaNoWriMo, we managed to take a Saturday to explore around town and find this temple. I'm finding that it's difficult to write about -- even saying things like "words can't do it justice" doesn't do justice to its undescribability. We took a
cable-car up the side of the mountain that faces downtown Busan and picked up the
trail there. Hiking is very popular in Korea, so there are loads of trails everywhere -- some marked in Korean and English, some in Korean only and some not at all. We looped around the crest of the mountain, eventually finding the old fortress
gate where our
hike began in earnest. This meant plunging down a steep bouldery
"trail" on the other slope, in order to get to a steep uphill climb on a separate
peak -- one that is nestled between other ones and remains totally hidden from everywhere in the city. Up, around, down, and up again finally brought us to
Seokbulsa.
The temple is
carved into a giant boulder sitting at the peak. There are
other, wooden, temple
buildings around it. Reliefs of
Gods and
Buddhas are carved into the granite, as well as small
caves and chambers for prayer and meditation. The temple is operational, and because of its relative inaccessibility (even with the cable-car, it was about a 3-hour hike) remains quiet even on a brisk weekend afternoon. There are
stairs that lead up past the gods and Buddhas, to other small meditation chambers. We climbed these, but I felt really uncomfortable at that level -- in a way that is similar to my standard fear of heights, but somehow different. Instead of a physical discomfort, it was a psychic one -- my knees were solid, but my mind became shaky. I think that a more balanced, compassionate and quiet soul is needed to be comfortable up there, with forty-foot buddhas at one's heel and a
giant city bustling somewhere in the silencing distance.
After the mountain, there was Hurmshinchang -- but that's next stop on the bus.
