The extremely ornate pagoda from Samgwangsa Temple in Busan.Hello Again Everyone!!Another interesting aspect to the Korean pagoda is the varying number of tiers that make up the height of the pagoda. And like all things related to the pagoda, the tiers also have a lot of symbolic meaning attached to them.First, it must be stated that hardly any Korean pagodas have an even amount of tiers to its he ...

A long-time opponent of zoos, my up-close experience with wild animals has been somewhat limited.  A trip through SE Asia years ago provided brushes with iguanas, water buffalo, and the ubiquitous gecko, but sightings of elephants or tigers evaded me; I refused to visit them in camps, wary of bearing witness to animals who underwent training for the sole purpose of entertaining humans.  Wild cre ...

On Friday one of my best Korean pals, Lindsay (who writes a mean blog of her own) , and I went off in search of an owl-y adventure. And Seoul provided as with the perfect spot… the Owl Museum!

Homigot Re-published with permission from the author. Check out The ...

Over the recent Lunar New Year holiday, Ian and I had the chance to try out some traditional Korean folk games. I’ve profiles a few before: like Jegichagi, the Korean hacky-sack, and Neolttwigi, the seesaw jumping game,  but the game we are going to talk about today is Yutnori. Last Lunar New Year I showed you this picture:

A look inside the cave that houses the 8th century Amita-bul statue at Mitaam Hermitage.Hello Again Everyone!!While out on a Sunday drive, I decided to finally visit the last of the major temples or hermitages listed on the Yangsan city website: Mitaam Hermitage (미타암). For various reasons, the most notable being the distance from where I live, I had yet to visit. And it almost seems as thoug ...

If someone were to blindfold you and then drop you off at the intersection above Gongdeok Station, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Gangnam and not Mapo-gu.  The neighborhood is starkly different from the much more modest nearby areas of Aeogae and Daeheung – massively more developed, a forest of brand new steel and glass towers with streams of heavy traffic moving along the wide ...

Homigot: Land of the Rising Sun At New Year, both Lunar and of the Gregorian variety, Korean people tend to visit places in the east of the country to watch the very first sunrise. There are often Sunrise Festivals (there is a festival for everything in Korea. EVERYTHING.) organised with bands and dancing and free tteokguk, a rice cake soup traditionally ea ...

Seollal: Lunar New Year Seollal is the first day of the lunar year and fell on January 23rd this year. Korean New Year generally falls on the day of the second new moon after the winter solstice. Seollal is a three-day holiday usually spent with family and has many associated traditions.

Waking to 6 a.m. rain and rooster calls, fried eggs for breakfast, fried eggs for dinner, packs of children trailing us on the Barangay dirt road, a marching band that travels from house to house each year for forty days, the sea-green river, wide wooden floor planks of a 15th-century church, cats, a clock tower, bananas and Red Horse beer, a porch rope hammock and again, rain, beading on the leaf ...