Temple Stay

Next day we got a five hour free bus out to Gyeongju. There we got a taxi out to Golgulsa temple to stay the night. It seems like quite a big thing to stay in a temple in Korea, it's open to both locals and foreigners. Kelly-Anne recommended this temple and it seems like it has more foreign tourists than the others. The temple stay was definitely an experience I loved and would recommend to people traveling to Korea. When we arrived we were really worried about offending people as they give you a big long list of rules. The girls at reception said to head up to the Sunmudo demonstration as we had arrived earlier than everyone else. So after getting changed into the clothes they had given us (and accidentally heading to the wrong building for a while) we headed up quite a steep hill to the main hall, there we saw a display of the martial arts/yoga/gymnastics art that the temple is famous for. While there we spent a lot of time worrying about who we had to bow to and what we were meant to be doing. There were loads of locals in for the display but we were told we should bow to monks. It was hard to see who was who in the crowd. The display was amazing. While no one fought they did more kicks and tumbles and gymnastics than anything else. We climbed up the cliff a little and got a look at another of the sights the temple is famous for which is a giant Buddha carved in to the cliff face about four feet off the ground for the ledge below. It has been there a very long time and was the reason they decided to rebuild the temple after it burned down. Then we hung around on a bench waiting for dinner not sure what to do with ourselves. At dinner we met another temple stay guest who we had bumped into earlier while looking for our rooms. The girls and guys eat separately at dinner and you have to eat everything on your plate as there has to be no waste after the meal. You can go up for seconds though so you can just take a nibble of everything and decide what you want more of. There is no meat allowed in the temple and the main bit of the meal is rice but they do have a good selection of sides. A lot of them were seaweed based but over the dinner, breakfast and lunch we got some really tasty things like good mushrooms, some sort of stewed potato and something really nice caramelised and marinated in soy sauce. After dinner we had orientation. Here we learned that the temple is really open to foreign guests and actually quite understanding. While they have a rule that you have to perform 3000 bows if you are late for chanting they don't enforce it with anyone other than the monks in the temple. They allow for people being late and they understand it can be hard to adjust. They also let you take pictures in the anywhere outside the main hall. After that we did some Sunmudo training which was very interesting. We were all stretched out by the end of it mind you. For the most part we did more yoga bits than martial arts but on Sunday's they have more relaxed a day than during the week. The reason for the martial arts and yoga seems to be a way of meditation as well as sort of a healthy body healthy mind approach to following Buddha's teaching. There were three foreign monks and quite a few younger girl and boy monks as well as the experienced monks who lived there. There is no difference in the levels that can be achieved by the girls and the guys, the only reason for separation during chanting, sleeping and eating seems to be to keep away distractions. Once of the monks was a Norwegian that had spent about eight years in the temple and he was a full monk of the temple. There was also a French guy who had been there for about one year in total over the last three years and a girl who was working in the temple for the last eight months (she was quite busy so we didn't get to see her much). We ended the day with meditation and chanting and were asleep in bed by nine.