The Temple Tour went into OT today.  Gaeamsa [Gay-ahm-sa] was the one temple, located less than 20 kilometers southeast of Buan.

I removed the month of dust off the seat, pumped the tires to 35psi, and took off for Gaeamsa.

It wasn’t a beautiful day. It was overcast and the air was damp. (Yep, I could have been in Oregon today.) I almost reached the temple when freezing rain started to fall. But, I looked up at the sky and yelled a few words. It took about an hour, but the sky eventually heard, understood my English, and stopped it’s nastiness.

It was me and three other visitors upon arrival. Five minutes later they left and it was just me. (okay, there was a dog barking, but he tired out quickly.) Peaceful.

I’ve never really given a lot of attention to the painted patterns on the temples. Today, I did. Today, I was alone. Today I saw the motifs on the exterior walls and the patterns of greens, reds, and blues covering the underside of the eaves. Amazing.

I stopped at the gift shop. I left with a 20 dollar box of incense. I don’t know what happened, but  20 dollars of incense didn’t seem unreasonable. It smelled so good! In the shop, the cashier lady saw me looking at some bamboo salts. We tried to communicate. The only Korean I understood was “Here, eat this.”  I tried some salt with her. The single crystal was potent. Sucking on it brought out a sulfur taste. I must of not shown any sort of disgust because she gave me a small packet of salt to take. “Service!”. OK!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Korea, superfine art, voyage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.