A Time For Tourism

Umbrellas
Originally uploaded by locoluko.

This weekend was a blast.
There was a team of MBA students from Azusa Pacific coming through on an Asian tour. They stopped by my school and I got to hang out with them for the weekend and go with them on their tour of the area. This was a blessing in many ways. One, because since I'm not here with an official 'program' I really haven't gone anywhere on the weekends. And two, it was great to be able to make jokes and laugh with people who understood your culture.

Saturday, we traveled to the ancient city of Gyoung Ju (used to be the largest city in the world about 1500 years ago with 2 million people), got to see temples, the world's largest granite buddah, ancient tombs (over 200 several stories tall hills and preserved against gravediggers because they were ingeniously surrounded spherically by 20ft of rocks) and our day was completed with a trip to the bathhouse/spa.

Let me tell you a little more about that last part. Quite an experience (because us westerners aren't used to the whole being naked in public bath houses thing - men and women in separate rooms of course). The bathhouse/sauna place we went consisted of a number of temperature-regulated pools and sauna rooms. The idea was to go from one extreme temperature pool to the next (ranging from 20'C to 50'C) Interspersed between were trips to different sauna rooms with moist herbal scents. The concept is that by going to the various extreme temperature pools, your pores open up and all the gunk and dead skin cells come out. At the end (like after an hour) you scrub everything off and shower. It's amazing how much dead skin you have. Afterwards we all felt relaxed and smooth.