Why have I not been blogging your ask? Well I have become a monk (temporarily). For the purpose of this blog I will compress two days (an afternoon and a morning) into one. So here goes.
We awoke to the sounds of wooden bells (not really a bell, more of a clopping thingy) at 4 o'clock. After groggily slipping on the incredibly baggy pants they supplied us and a tee shirt we began our ascent to the top of the mountain. After reaching the top we entered a temple and Chanting began. They distributed chanting books so even we foreigners could participate. My inability to quickly read the Korean alphabet severly limited my participation in this activity, which appear to upset the monk standing next to me. After Chanting for a while, we went outside to do meditation. We began with sitting meditation which is basically your stereotypical meditation. The sun was justing beginning to rise over the mountains as we began. It was a lovely scene which I was unfortunately unable to enjoy. During meditation you are suppose to close your eyes which of course limits your ability to enjoy the beauty around you. I just didn't have the guts to keep them open and risk the monks wrath. The second issue I experienced with meditation, at least outdoors, is that apparently the flys also enjoy the zen activity and crawl all over your arms and face, which certainly detracted from the experience. I wonder if killing flys isn't allowed during meditation, because I certainly broke that rule. We then began breakfast which was a lovely Korean standard. We had rice (what a surprise!), kimchi, and other greens. If I haven't written about kimchi (mispelled?) then I think I am obligated to do so now. Kimchi is basically pickled cabbage flavored with many exotic spices. Awful. I keep forcing myself to eat it because it is the MAIN traditional dish of Korea but it is absoluely horrid. Anyway, onward. We sat at the inofficial foreigners table with our two german pals and the Ohio sisters (I never did learn any of their real names) and began our meal as we talked of the upcoming day. After our pleasent breakfast we were allowed an hour of free time. After wasting away this precious hour we all went to Sunmodo class. I learned some kicks and many flexibility exercises. We meditated briefly and then continued. After class we got to do our 108 bows. A bow consists of clasping one's hands, lowering yourself to your knees, placing your forehead between your hands, gesturing, and rising back up. The whole process was timed to a recording of a chant which took about 45 boring minutes. We witnessed a demonstration of Sunmodo which honestly wasn't that terrific. It was neat to see what we were learning being done by professionals, but other than that it wasn't terribly entertaining. We had a few hours of free time afterwards which I used to get some much needed rest. Our second Sunmodo session began and we learned much of the same as the first, although we did learn a type of dance which was pretty interesting. Afterwards we returned to bed, and that is a day of a monk in training.
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