A morning with my Yoga Instructor and a Monk

A couple Saturday mornings ago I had the experience of a life time. I've been taking yoga lessons for about 2 months from this amazing Korean woman. At the beginning she only spoke a little English (random words like achilles tendon and fish pose, both of which she learned studying yoga in India). When I joined the class there were 3 foreigners but now there are about 6 of us so she has decided that she wants to learn more English. She is a super fast learner and she can now say all these really important words for yoga like, inhalation, 100 times and my favourite- sphincter up!

She has been wanting to take some of the foreigners out to her hometown or to a temple for a while but no one could find a day that worked. So, I ended up just going on my own and it was absolutely amazing.

I was quite worried about the lack of communication, as I know very little Korean and she knows very little English. However, keeping a conversation going wasn't the problem we somehow talked the entire time and I have to admit probably only understood each other for about 25% of the time! It was pretty funny to the both of us.

I met her super early and we headed out to what I knew at the time as a 'Flower Festival'. Korea has many flower festival and you never really know what your getting into. This one was in honour of the 'Spider Lily'. They are these beautiful red flowers that grow like asparagus straight out of the ground without any leaves. In Korea they are known as the heart ache flower because once they lose their flowers and the top falls off they grow their leaves. I don't really get the logic behind it and I feel as though I've lost a lot of it in translation. Nonetheless they are pretty cool looking!

I knew that we were going to a festival and to have lunch with her friend. But, in fact we went to this festival that was at a Temple and then proceeded to have tea with her friend, a monk! When I say we had tea, I mean we officially had a tea ceremonies. It was amazing. The chief element of the Korean tea ceremony is the ease and naturalness of enjoying tea within an easy formal setting...and that's what we did :)

The monk was beautiful and completely relaxed he just exuded this feeling of Zeness. He was sat in the middle of an open window area of a temple like structure and his back was to the mountains. So as I sat there I could see gorgeous mountains. We sat there with him and they chatted in Korean, every once in awhile looking at me as if I should add something because they were talking about me. I just smiled and kept saying thank you. Then she told him that I had a bad back and he immediately grabbed my hand and told me to breath. I did and I focused really hard and I could feel all this wild energy flowing in and out! After that he got up and went around to my back and did all this stuff, once he was finished I had a sigh of relief it was pretty wild!

After our tea ceremonies we took a walk around and headed back down to where the actual festival was happening to watch some of the drumming performance. We left the festival and it seemed like she wanted to take me to this other festival, or maybe it was part of the same, but there was a huge line of cars. So, instead we drove out to the ocean near her hometown (I think) and for a drive around the countryside. It was so nice to be in a car, it's been 9 months since I've been somewhere in car that hasn't been a taxi.

We then went to eat at this special restaurant with tonnes of side dishes! It was so good! She's such a fantastic lady and is so nice to everyone in our yoga class. I'm so happy to have met her and will definitely miss her classes when I leave.


This picture above is taken on one of my many random field trips. It was so cool!!

On the leaving note...I'm about 45ish sleeps away from departure! So wild! I can't believe my contract and year are up. So in saying that, see you soon everyone :) !!!!!

Happy Chuseok and lots more!

Well Hello Everyone!

Sending big smiles and hugs to everyone back home!!! I've been busy over the past month with lots of great adventures!

Three weeks ago I went to this wicked mountain in the interior of Korea, Songnisan. I went with a group of my friends along with 2 English bloaks who were hear visiting my friend Chris (the guy I went to Japan with). We had a great time! The park was surrounded by 600 year-old pine trees and had many Temples. The most extravagant of the Temples was Beopjusa Temple on Mt. Songnisan. It was built in the 14th year of Silla King Jo-Heung's reign. Here I saw the biggest standing Buddha ever! It was wild, I found it a bit much as it seemed a bit goddy...

After we visited the extravagant statue and Temple grounds we headed up the mountain to find our lodge. We stayed an hour in from the main entrance. It was great we were hiking along a fairly rugged path and then boom there was our little lodge. It was a really beautiful setting with a stream running through the area. That night the owners served us up an all veggie dinner which was delicious. The next day we hiked up through temples, streams, beautiful trees to the top of of Songnisan Mountain. The view was amazing and the rock formations were really wild! On the way down we were so hot and sweaty that we found a great stream to swim in and a natural waterslide!!!

The weekend after that was my really good friend Maria's birthday. So we had a birthday bash for her on the rooftop of her and her hubbies apartment. The next day I got up fairly early and headed out for a beach that's only about an hour away from my city. I went with 2 wicked friends and all we did was sit around, sing, drink wine and swim. What I call a perfect Sunday!!

Last weekend was one of the 2 biggest celebrations in Korea. It's called Chuseok and is basically their Thanksgiving. Unfortunately for everyone the holiday fell on a Sunday so everyone in the entire country only got one day vacation! (They work way to much in this country)For the vacation I went up to Seoul to meet all my friends from there and head to a beautiful island of the island of Incheon (that's where the International airport is). We took a fast ferry and where there within an hour. We weren't the only ones with the idea of going to an island though. When we got there we soon found out that almost every English teacher from Seoul was there! Well, maybe I'm exagerating a bit, but still there were more foreigners there then I've seen since I got to Korea. At first it was almost an annoyance that all these foreigners were at the same place, but we found a perfect little camping area and had an amazing time all together.

The highlight of the weekend was meeting a family of Koreans who sat down with us late on Saturday night. We all just sat around drinking soju and talking Konglish, so good!

Most recently it was my friend Sarah's birthday so in her honour we headed back to the beach. I've been to more beaches this past summer then I've ever been to! I love it! It was a great low key weekend :)