Buddhist Templestay

I did a templestay this weekend.  Templestays are quite popular in Korea. People can witness firsthand the life of a monk. I did not take any pictures so I will do my best to describe my own experience. On Friday, I headed to the island of Ganghwa, which is about 2 hours away from Seoul.  The temple was nestled between a rice paddy field and a forest. The grounds were beautifully green with flowers everywhere and lanterns hanging that were lit a night. When I arrived I was shown my room and issued grey garments to wear. The shirt looked like a hospital robe and the bottoms looked like MC Hammer jam pants. Hot. The monk that translated English was actually from Russia and a little hard to understand. He gave us our orientation. There was about 10 of us total. Three people from Singapore, two Canadians, one kiwi, one Australian, four Koreans and me. We were called to main temple by a moktak (a wooden percussion instrument play to start the day). We began with chanting and bowing. I really enjoyed listening to the monks chant but the bowing was pretty exhausting. We had dinner after that. All the meals were vegetarian which was convenient since I am still not eating meat. After that we had a twenty minute meditation session. I started out counting in my head and asking the question "Who am I?" between counts. It was so relaxing I had a hard time not nodding off. After that we had a little bit of free time before lights out at 9:00. I could not fall asleep and 2:45 AM came very quickly. We started off with a chant that included 108 bows. I stopped after about 25. After that we meditated again. I did a little better during that session. The activities in the late morning included walking the temple grounds, breakfast, more chanting and calligraphy. My calligraphy was so bad that the Russian monk laughed at me. When I asked him if he thought it was ugly he said "No, it is beautiful" and I think a little piece of me fell in love at that moment. I'll never forget you, Russian monk in Korea. I left in the afternoon. The fresh air was wonderful. My time with the monks was inspiring. But I could definitely not be a monk.