Journal Entry: 5/24/09
Today we took a three hour drive to visit the Haeinsa Temple. It is one of the best known Buddhist Monasteries in Korea and home to the remains of Siddhartha Gautama.
It was about a mile hike uphill and the park was filled with shrines and stones piled on top of each other. People stack the stones as a wishing method. Real monks still live here. Haeinsa is also home to the Tripitaka Koreana. These are the wooden tablets (81,258 of them) with carved Buddhist scriptures. They are a print making device where the monks roll them with ink and then place paper on top to have the imprint. Koreans were the first with this printing knowledge while all other places were still writing the scriptures by hand.
Don’t be fooled by this tempting sign claiming to serve “nutritious soup”. They may believe the the soup is nutritious but they are in fact serving you dog meat soup. You can find videos on Youtube about that if you’re interested.
We skipped that stop and decided to have gourmet Pizza Hut instead. Delicious. Appetizers consisted of bruschetta, chicken wings, quesadillas, and riblets. The pizzas has so many toppings on them that one piece was filling. They also served lechee and sangria fountain drinks.
In 2009 I traveled to South Korea to study abroad. I kept a diary of each day of my visit. When I returned to the United States, I created these digitized posts of my entries and the images that I took on each corresponding day. You can find all the South Korea journal entries here.
