Silly Little Kids

Yesterday, being Sunday and having temperatures that were nice we decided to get out of the house and go walk around somewhere with our cameras.  We headed up the mountain to Pagyesa on Palgongsan.  Adam has been to this temple once, or so he had thought, but I never had.  The mountain was super busy because it is dropwort harvest time.  {Dropwort looks like cilantro leaves but you each the bulb root.  Adam has tried it and says it tastes like dirt.  Koreans like to eat it with their grilled meat.}  The temple had a lot of traffic going through it also but it was still as calm and serene as ever.  It was pretty neat. This one had  a spirit temple where the spirit of the mountain was preserved and there was a painting of him as an old man with a tiger.  As Miley Cyrus would say, "pretty cool."

While at the temple I bought a beautiful rose quartz bracelet (I love temple bracelets) with a lotus on it and a tapestry.  The woman running the counter was able to speak English a little bit and she was able to tell me that my tapestry was for an open mind, happiness and good health and was painted by a monk.  She also gave me a very deep respectful bow.  I love going to Temples the people are the coolest!

After the temple trip we were hungry so we headed to a street food vendor and had some delicious toppokki, mandu, kimbap, and odang (all for the low, low price of 6,800 won).  While we were there a group of young boys kept walking by us.  Every time they did they would giggle and say, "Hello.  Nice to meet you."  {I have been told that in Korea when you learn just a little bit of English you tend to think that this is the standard greeting... all of it together.}  So, we would say, "Nice to meet you, too."   After a while the boys began to mimic that part of the conversation back to us.  It was quite entertaining.  Then by the 5th time walking by us I decided to mix it up and as they walked by saying the same thing and giggling I said, "Good-bye.  Have a nice day."  They froze.  I had really confused them.  One boy did catch the good bye and was like "GOOD BYE!"  This was about the time we were done eating so we paid and started walking back to our car.  Just so happened this took us past the boys one last time.  Now they had picked up a group of girls their age (which was about 12 years old).  They were all eating ice cream which comes in plastic coke shaped bottles that have a twist off top.  The one boy, the leader, tried to hand the garbage top to Adam and he just walked past him to the car.  I stopped though and looked at the boy trying to figure out what he was doing.  He kept telling me something in Korean holding the top of the ice cream bottle and laughing.  So I held out my hand to take it.  The girls got all disgusted and started yelling at me to stop.  One even took the bottle top and threw it on the ground.  I just laughed at them all and told them they were bad while laughing.  The boys then wanted me to tell the girls they were ugly.  The girls looked like they were going to ring the boys necks so I just told the girls that they were ee-poo-dah (pretty).... they giggled, the boys snorted and everyone took off running.  Adam and I walked back to our car.  It was all a very unique experience that you can only really have in Korea.