Mountain of Crab, Temple on the Ocean, and Chicken on a Griddle

 On Wednesday Nicole and I grabbed a late morning coffee and pastry and made a call back to the states. Our plan was to visit 2 Buddhist temples: the only seaside temple on the East coast - Naksana, and a temple in the Seoraksan National Park - Baekdamsa. We soon realized that our late start paired with the 1+ hour drive to each would mean we could only visit one and we chose the one next to the crab restaurants. Sokcho is a small town about halfway between Gangneung and the North Korean border and is lined with locally sourced seafood restaurants, some with kitschy decorations to draw-in hungry outsiders. The spot we chose had a large fiberglass crab. Our meal was impressive - it started out modestly with simple bonchon of rice cake, cabbage, whole prawns and kimchi, but expanded to the...I guess pre-meal? Fried fish with a sweet sauce, tempura shrimp, fresh fish salad, white fish sashimi, corn cheese, and kimchi pajeon. I was almost full by the time the main course of enormous, pre-cracked snow crab came out. That put me over the edge, it was delicious! The meal also included the innards of the crab, which I tried both fresh and fried with rice, but I don't think I'll foster a craving for it in the future.

One of the cool things we saw at the restaurant were a couple of freedivers, or hanyeo, but unfortunately I didn't have my telephoto lens with me to capture them.


The road to Sokcho parallels national parks and forests

Another selfie spot

Appetizers

It was all very fresh!

We all turned into tourists with a spread like this!

Main course

Next up in the queue
We left quite a mess

We made our way to Naksana Temple complex which was founded in 671 AD and from what I could surmise from the information boards on-site, has been destroyed and rebuilt several times. The last time it was destroyed was in 2005 by an accidental fire which was hot enough to melt their historic bronze bell. It has since been rebuilt and restored and is gorgeous! 

It was just a couple days after Buddha's birthday so celebratory lanterns were still hanging along the walkways. Never having visited a buddhist temple before, I didn't know what to expect or generally what was expected of me. To call them tourist attractions wouldn't tell the whole story. People visit them to pray and there are monks that live onsite to maintain them and lead prayers, but they also sell trinkets, coffee and tea and ice cream presumably to fund their efforts. The temple also allows people to purchase a candle on which people write their prayers and wishes on them to leave in the temple. This same idea is applied to the shingles of the temple where you can write your wishes on them for a fee and they are then used in future buildings or renovations. We took the opportunity to write our wishes on one shingle in Korean.



Picturesque location


The detail of the temples are impressive


Candles for prayers

Carvings from previous monks, can't find any information on when they were inscripted


Bells for wishes

Shingles with wishes and prayers written on them. I saw several languages on the shingles




Lanterns leftover from Buddha's birthday






I followed Nicole and Kyoung to one of the temples to pray, although I know very little about Buddhism. Just like my experiences with yoga, I followed what they were doing out of the corner of my eye and just copied everything they did. Because we were the only people there, I took the opportunity to take more photos of the shrine.










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