Sexy Monk Tour 2009 Part One

This past weekend I went with the Seoul International Hiking Club on an overnight temple stay trip to South Jeolla province. It's the most southwestern of the provinces on the Korean peninsula.

There were just 7 of us on this trip and we were a typical cross section of the hiking club members. There was a Russian professor (of Russian language and literature), a French photographer who works for the US military, an American social worker (also with the US military), a Scottish professor of engineering, my friend James (a Canadian), our organizer, Jinna (a Korean woman who was reared in England and so speaks English with a British accent) and me. Usually there are a lot more people on the weekly hikes, but not so many wanted to stay over at a temple, which included getting up before dawn.

On Saturday morning we took a train from Seoul to a small city called Naju. It's famous for being the starting point of a big student resistance movement that happened in the early years of the Japanese occupation of Korea (1909-1945). Jinna had hired a van to pick us up and the first place we went to look was the former train station, which was preserved as a kind of monument to the students who started the movement.

Then we were invited to look around a small new museum about the history of the resistance in Naju. Although we wanted to get started hiking, we felt it would've been rude not to accept, so we got a tour of the museum, which was actually pretty interesting. One thing I learned was that in Confucian tradition the reason men didn't cut their hair was because it would have been like symbolically killing their parents. So, one of the ways the Japanese humiliated the Koreans during the occupation was by publicly cutting off men's hair, like staging a mass barber shop event in the town square.

From Naju we drove to Mihwangsa, a Buddhist temple where we took a short walk. This particular temple was the only one I've seen in Korea that had plain unpainted wood, rather than the usual bright colors. Even though we didn't have time for a full hike, it was a beautiful area just to look at for awhile. The land in the countryside is really pretty here--green and lush. The mountains aren't very high, but they're typically really steep.

Here are two monks - male and female - from Mihwangsa.

There was also a beautiful tea shop.