Shaman Temple Hike

So, last Saturday my coworkers and I planned a trip to a shaman temple in Seoul. The subway ride there seemed to take forever, it took about one hour and forty-five minutes for us to get there. On the subway, there was a malfunctioning television monitor that looked really cool, so I decided to record some video. That video can be view below this blog. My intention is to eventually record my music over it.

Once on foot, we had a little trouble trying to find exactly where the temple was so we asked some of the locals, in very basic Korean, where to go. After figuring where our destination was, we hiked up the inclined streets to the entrance of the temple’s gate. A couple of my coworkers were allergic to climbing things like stairs and hills so they were miserable and didn’t really care to climb more once we got there, so they followed us all the way to the first level of the temple site and then disappeared. On our way up, there were some temple buildings that were painted with these beautifully vivid colors. We took some photos and headed further up to a serene meditation rest. You could feel the change in energy; I almost instantly went from observing and just taking everything in to feeling and being aware. The higher we got the more quiet everything seemed to get, with faint noises of the city making its way up the mountain. Most of the group stopped at one spot and partook the beauty of silence. You could see all of Seoul from where we were. There were apartment complexes, from right to left, as far as one could see. I thought about how it would look at night with all the red crosses.

After a while, I decided to leave and get higher, I just wanted to go higher and higher as high as I could go. I don’t know what that’s all about. Why do we have the sensation to climb higher? What purpose does it serve? Regardless, I climbed higher up the mountain and on my way I saw Soju bottles, candy still in wrappers and other foods. We found out later that they are offerings to the spirits. From my point of view, it was littering. There’s nothing like hiking, feeling one with nature and then seeing plastic wrappers, empty booze containers and other products of man’s creations. Some of the group joined me on higher ground and we trekked further up this beaten path to where more people were meditating. On our way up, I saw this narrow passage in the mountain and I had the urge to climb through it so I carefully jolted up to check it out. As I was climbing through this passage, some Korean guy started heckling my friends in Korean and they started yelling to me that I’m not supposed to go up there. After a few photos of the guy telling me to get down, I made my way to my friends and we scaled down the mountainside to reunite with the rest of the group. Once every one was together, we headed back to the city to get some food and head to our next destination, Insa-dong (the artsy section of Seoul). Before entering the subway, we stopped at a fried chicken called Thunder Chicken. I mean with a name like that, you have eat some chicken. In the store’s window were piles of fried chicken waiting to be photographed then eaten.