This was my last day in Busan, my last day in Korea -but not quite my last day on holiday, because I’m stopping in Tokyo for a couple of days before I head back to Europe! So, today was mostly about tying up loose ends.
With another gloriously sunny morning outside, temperatures rising to a mad 17°C (17°C up from my early days in Seoul!!) I set out on another one of those long Busan metro and bus routes that take an hour to get from one sight to the next.
Beomeosa is as I understand the most important temple in Busan. Founded in the 7th century, it is a place as vested in history as it is nestled in the mountains: the role of the bus that takes you there from the metro station is more about climbing the steep slope up than about bridging the relatively short distance.
Once there, the first thing that struck me was how remote it feels, surrounded on all sides by trees running the whole palette of fall colors. Looking around, I could see mountain slopes dotting the horizon, as if I was deep in a forgotten forests -even though I had just passed streets with cafes and convenience stores on the way up!
The temple occupies a large extension of interconnected structures, many of them off-limits to visitors. After all, these temples all carry out their own work despite the tourist activity, and this one more than most sustains a thriving templestay practice; that’s a national Korean program through which people can stay in temples and experience life as a novice. Reading about it, it sounds more practical than what I did in Koyasan in Japan (as chronicled in this blog): there I was basically a paying hotel guest, whereas here it looks like guests are way more integrated into the monks’ life, for better and for worse.
There were quite a few tourists around, but the place is spacious enough that we didn’t really bump into each other. Many visitors were Buddhists who would take some time to enter into the chambers to kneel in front of Buddha’s statues and pray, while monks droned on in the background. Maybe it was an illusion, but I felt I could smell mountain air sometimes, despite it being quite hot at noon! There was a giant gingko tree, too, this one 580 years old! But it had already shed all its leaves, unlike the one in Seoul that was still a vivid yellow.
Eventually I made my way back down to Seomyeon, where I wanted to check out a couple of stores as a last-minute shopping thing. I had lunch at the food court of the Lotte mall, which is not quite as impressive as Shinsegae’s but still quite a spectacle! This was all just one bakery:
After a while of window-shopping, and then a little bit of shopping-shopping, I felt guilty about calling it a day having just seen one thing so I caught a bus to see another thing: Samgwangsa.
After seeing so many ancient temples in South Korea, this one’s different for being modern, built in the 1980s in fact. Also up a steep slope, resting on a hillside, its main characteristic is being huge, especially its enormous main building, a stark contrast with the low but expansive footprints of traditional temples.
(A note on temples: with the benefit of hindsight, if I had to redo this trip I would take one day off Busan and try to rework the itinerary to try and see Haeinsa, another one of the country’s top temples. The reason is that, being a huge nerd, I am fascinated by the temple’s biggest treasure: the Tripitaka Koreana, a marvel of philology and conservation. It is a massive collection of Buddhist sacred texts, written on over 80,000 wooden tablets, in the thirteenth century, with the express purpose of preserving them for centuries -and it worked! I invite you to look it up if it appeals. I don’t actually think you can see the tablets themselves, hence why I didn’t feel too pressured to go to Haeinsa in this trip.)
Anyway, that was it for me! Nothing left but to go back to my apartment and then on to a farewell dinner. I’ve spent all trip wanting to have japchae, Korean glass noodles, which I think is the only Korean staple that I haven’t tried, but they didn’t offer them at any of the places I’ve been to. I think it might be that it’s too “common” a dish, like if in Spain you tried to find a restaurant that made French omelettes. Anyway, finally today I found a Chinese-Korean restaurant in Seomyeon that had a dish that was half-japchae, half rice with black bean sauce. It was delicious! What a great note to end a great trip on.
Traveling through Korea has been quite an experience. Having been to Japan several times before, the most practical, most immediate aspects of adapting to a new place felt familiar: the layout of subway stations, convenience stores, the look and feel of the cities… but beyond that surface layer it’s been enlightening to get to know a little bit more about the history and the character of the country, deeper than the polished, hi-tech view we get from movies and K-dramas. The people, the food, the atmosphere are all very much their own, and for all the troubles I had communicating, I never felt unwelcome anywhere. I hope to come back one day and continue exploring!
This Is A Lake 