6th Grade Camp

Well folks, after a rick rollicking weekend that saw me spend way too much money and drink three nights in a row, I headed off to my school's 6th Grade Camp. Now for those of you that are familiar with school camps you might assume as I did that we would be headed into the woods for a few days and be camping. Well I can say that our three days did involve lots of walking and two mountain hikes, but as for staying in insect infested cabins, that we did not. I think the problem was one of translation from Korean to English. In reality this would be more like a 3 day sixth grade field trip. We stayed in the capital of Gyeongsanbuk-Do province. Yeah it's a helluva mouthful, but as I've found out every province is a pain to pronounce. The city name however is much easier to say.

Gyeong-Ju has been described by several guide books as the museum without walls. For once I honestly think the guide books are true. Gyeong-Ju once was the capital of the Shilla empire which was the first empire to unify all of Korea. In this one small city lay several burial mounds of the Kings and several temples and parks constructed during these times. The city itself seems to thrive primarily on tourism as it is really quite small. The central section can be covered in about twenty minutes by foot. That's smaller then Seosan. However, while the city itself may be small, the surrounding districts encompass countless Korean National Treasures. Be it the burial mounds at Tummuli Park, Wolseong Park, Anapji Pond, Bunhwangsa which holds the oldest observatory in East Asia, and two of the several temples located nearby. These two temples, the Bulguksa which is absolutely beautiful and featured at the end of the video, or the Seokguram Grotto which has a large stone Buddha hidden in what else, a grotto. Aren't names great things, sometimes they actually tell you something about a place.

However, I am actually getting one day ahead. Day one consisted of a simple three hour bus ride to the middle of nowhere. You know as much as I enjoy Buddhist temples, they really have a bad habit of not only putting them in the middle of nowhere, but also putting them at the top of mountains. We stopped at one of the most famous temples in all of Korea called Haeinsa. This wonderful temple houses over 80,000 wood block carvings of traditional Buddhist texts. This is one of the largest collections of Buddhist script in the entire world, if not the largest. These wood blocks are preserved not in a modern facility, but in the original facility constructed to house them. The Korean government tried to build a modern place to house these priceless texts, but sample wood blocks quickly fell victim to mold. Located on a mountain in a well ventilated room these texts have not molded nor fallen victim to countless fires and invasions. Somehow they are perfectly preserved, which for those of you who do not know Korean history is an amazing feat. Not even the Japanese during their occupation were able to take these priceless treasures back to Japan. This needless to say is a point of pride in Korea.

After the wonderful mountain climb and visit to the temple we hopped back aboard the bus for our ride to the Korean National History museum in Gyeong-Ju. This is probably the best Korean History museum in the country. It houses thousands of pieces of Korean history ranging from the paleolithic age to the iron age. I feel a little bad however due to the fact that once you have been to ten or fifteen of these style museums, you have really seen them all. The artifacts may change but they all follow the same basic program. However, this museum did have a large collection of Buddhist art that was far different from anything I had seen before.

After the first day we went off and visited all the sites I mentioned already, and then also went to Posco, which is a giant steel plant. It was kinda cool, especially when we got to walk through the steel plate facility where they were pulling steel out and cooling it. Cool yes, but definitely not the highlight of the trip. Posco is the third largest company in Korea. It falls just behind Samsung and Lotte. After this we took the students to the Eastern Ocean. For many of these students it was the first time they saw a see where the waves break just off the beach. For the most part the Western Sea has large flat beaches where the waves don't break anywhere near the beach. This led to several students, and quite a few teachers getting their shoes and pants soaked when the waves came up farther then expected. For a veteran of Beaches like these, it was quite funny.

On the third day, after the two temples we hopped back up on the bus and drove home. Now this would seem like a great chance to relax after three hectic days with the students. However, not so. After stopping at a rest stop we decided to Nori-Bang the bus. That's right. You can Nori-Bang Korean buses. Needless to say for the next two hours we listened to pre-teens and some teens sing K-pop. 90% of the kids couldn't sing, and more importantly many of them were starting that wonderful process where our voices change. So there was lots of squeaking and squealing and bad music. By the way so you can have a taste of this music, here you go.