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craig has been in korea for nearly two weeks. so far we’ve had a bit of fun and hung out together. mostly, it was good to catch up with him, since i haven’t seen him in three years. on saturday night, craig and i headed out to coex to photograph the huge buddha statue at bong eun temple. we headed out around dusk and climbed the hill behind the statue. we got a few shots and went back down. i’ve already been to this spot twice, so last night’s shoot was mainly for craig’s benefit.

the rubber chicken will be in korea for another week before bouncing out to hong kong on his way back to oz. actually, the korean weather has got the best of craig, and he’s been sick for two days. hopefully he’ll start feeling better so we can enjoy the last week of his stay.

the highlights so far have been corn, chatting and joking randomly, running away from people who start random converstations with us on the subway “hello, are you from siberia?”, corn, listening to hockey games online, braving the cold to shoot at night, corn, and various other musings.

it’s been awesome to catch up …

this. this is seriously one of the best short videos i’ve ever seen. i stumbled across it and i’m really glad that i did. i don’t know if it’s possible to understand how profound this is. what’s more, this sums up my opinions about life and the highly ravenous approach to life in korea.

if those thoughts aren’t enough to grab you, perhaps you’ll be more interested to know that it’s narrated by alan watts (famous buddhist philosopher) and animated by trey parker and matt stone (creators of southpark).

enjoy …

another big buddhist weekend … i headed to cheongju to meet ryand and his girlfriend. i got there friday night and headed into town to meet a girl from model mayhem. her name is brittany and she’s going to model for me this month or next month (depending on when we can organise our schedules). i stayed at a motel and next morning i headed out with ryan to check the local temples.

the temples were pretty cool, one had a medium size stone buddha. the other was on top of the huge hill and had a good view of the city. both temples were decorated with lanterns and preparing for another weekend of buddhist birthday festivities. we got lots of photos at both temples … but the best part was when we left the temples we walked a little ways and stopped at a cafe. the cafe was a ‘photo and coffee’ cafe, owned by a guy who studied photography in america. the cafe was freaking huge, it was about 4 stories tall (built on the side of a hill) had a fabulous view of the city, and there were a million rooms and spiral staircases. the owner was great. he gave us a tour of the building and showed us his lecture room, studio and other small rooms used for shooting photos in. it was really quite a find! he even told us that we can rent parts of the building to photograph in … and it’s rather cheap, which is great. i anticipate heading down there in the future and making use of his great rooms and spaces.

saturday night we hung around at ryan’s house. we dranks some beers and felt really lazy. one of ryan’s noisy neighbours came around and brought angju (alcohol) with him. this stuff was incredibly expensive and really potent. it’s basically a big jar of alcohol with fermented mushrooms in it. the stuff is potent as all hell and is more suited to stripping oil off a garage floor, than drinking.

this morning we headed out of town, bearing east, towards beopjusa. i’d already visited the temple once before, but was keen to get back there before my time in korea ends. we arrived at the temple just after 10am and had a good look around. i took a lot of photos and made the most of the great weather (clear blue skies). although, i was kicking myself for forgetting my polarisers (i’ve lived in seoul too long, where i get no chances to use them). however, i still got a lot of good photos.

after we left the temple, ryan and i headed towards the town and got some lunch. then we walked back to the bus stop to get a ticket to cheonan. this is where our awesome plans went horribly wrong! there were no busses to cheonan. we either had to go back to cheongju, seoul or daejon, and get a bus to cheonan from there. we decided that it would take too long and we’d miss the remaining daylight. so we walked back into town, got some pa-jon and kimchi-jon, dong dong ju (rice wine) … we spent the afternoon drinking and talking. at about 5.30 we jumped on a bus back to cheongju, and there i switched busses and came back to seoul.

overall, it was a great weekend. i’m a bit tired, to be expected, but i had fun wandering aroundall weekend. ryan and i plan on getting to cheonan one weekend in the next month or two … if the weather is good, we’ll just do an afternoon trip and head out to see the buddha, then have dinner and return home. it’s the only black buddha that i know of in korea, and i’m determined to see it this summer.