In May we took a free tour done by the USO to Guinsa Temple. It is a recruiting temple for those who would like to be monks. It was on a lot of land. We rode the bus for about 2 hours to get to it. These pictures are out of order too but here is Ezra doing a meditation session with a monk. If I remember right, this is the first time an official group from the base has come out to this temple. And the best part was it was all free.
The colors at Korean temples are my favorite thing about them.
At the end we were all the way up the mountainside to the topmost part of their temple. It was a large courtyard surrounded by lots of the painted animals you see below.
There were lots of walkways connecting different buildings that were painted so beautifully. Our besties the DeWitts came with us on this trip. The kids were such good sports. We climbed hundreds and hundreds of stairs and did a pretty tough hike as well. We had no idea there would be all those stairs and the hike. We were pretty exhausted and hot by the end and were carrying multiple kids at a time again.
At the top section of the temple. Below, Koreans were always handing my kids candy and treats when we lived there and here was no exception. She shared her candy with all the kids.
This archway was down at the very bottom of the mountain (before we knew what we were getting into :)).
The saddest/coolest part was lunch. They said they were providing lunch for us and we had no idea it was going to be the lunch that monks eat. It was not good and hard to get the kids to eat any of it (let alone myself). Our guide actually had to go over and talk to the people who were serving the lunch and tell them that Americans don't really eat this food and that they have no rules in their culture saying they have to eat it all. It was embarrassing. But I guess a lot of people were not able to turn in their trays because they hadn't eaten it all and so the guide had to talk to the servers. This was well before we had started lunch (we were one of the last people down the mountain so in turn one of the last people to lunch haha).
YUM. haha. most of the people on the tour raided the mini mart way down by where the bus was for food before we left.
You can kind of see in these two pictures how many stairs and how the buildings were all connected.
We were supposed to visit a lake after the temple but the temple took so long that we didn't have time to do that. It was a beautiful village of temples though and I'm glad we were able to take advantage of this trip!
