Korea Trip-Mu Sang Sa

Here are the pictures from my visit to Mu Sang Sa temple, only a year after I was actually there. The trip to Mu Sang Sa was the first time I'd really been out of Seoul. I got to ride on one of So. Korea's high speed trains and it was seriously fast! It made a two hour trip in one hour! I love the Korean countryside. It is very lush and mountainous. People grow food in every square foot of free space and take a lot of pride in good land management.

The temple itself is half way up the side of a mountain. This is the view from the parking lot.

Here is my room. I really enjoyed the accomodations. I shared this room with three other women but the best part was that our room had it's own bathroom! No more climbing up and down four flights of stairs in the night! Here are my roommates. From the left, they are Eu Young who lives in the US, Grace from Seoul and Swannie from Hong Kong.The buildings all have these wonderful walkways all around the second floor. This was such a great shady place to hang out and relax.

This is the view from our floor over to the Meditation Hall. In Korea, they have seperate rooms and sometime entire seperate buildings for a lot of the things we all do in one room here. This hall is only used for meditation, no chanting, no ceremonies.

This is my seat in the Meditation Hall. I spent most of my time right here looking out that window you can just see at the top of the picture.One day, I looked out and there sat this bird in the tree. He stayed there all day and I can only assume he is some kind of owl. One way or another, we sat together all one day. It was kind of cool.For chanting and ceremonies, we have the Buddha Hall. We walked up the hill to this building every morning and evening for chanting.

Here is another view from the top of the hill. It is a little bit hard to tell but this building is very ornately carved. My favorite carvings of all were the dragons looking out the front of the building. Why were they my favorite? Because we had dragon heads looking out of the front of the building and dragon butts on the inside!

This whole building has since been painting. I'll have to dig up the link to the pictures. The place looks completely different.

Some other sights around Mu Sang Sa were this baby Buddha peeking out of a stone lantern,

the beautiful hydrangeas,everyone's pal, the big toad under the hydrangea,and, lastly, everyone's shoes by the door. This is an image I will aways associate with my trip to Korea. My shoes are the white sneakers just to the left of center.I have more to post about Mu Sang Sa but I've got to do it tomorrow. My sales slips are not going to enter themselves into the computer and my second quarter sales tax is due on Monday.