Fall brings some of my favorite things; cooler weather, football season, bonfires and the leaves changing color. Well it was fall when I arrived and it was still hot, there were no fires, certainly no football and ever single leaf was lush and green. I began to think Korea was going to deny me the simple but best things of my favorite season. Well there’s still no sign of football and the last fire I saw was one I started in my kitchen…but November has finally delivered the colder weather and brighter colors. In a very big way.
The temperature is dropping dramatically and without me even noticing the leaves have transformed to the most vibrant colors imaginable. The change in my surroundings was compounded last weekend when my school decided to move me to a new apartment. Doesn’t really seem like a big thing but when you get a new apartment in Korea…you get nothing. So everything has to move. The apartment I was living in had accumulated a ton of stuff from previous teachers and it was a bit of task to move it but, with some help from my co-teacher Heather and a HUGE hand from the one and only Josh Doerschuk, I managed to cram everything into a smaller but MUCH cleaner apartment.
To celebrate the successful move Josh and I loaded up and headed to the down town area of Jeonju (Gaeksa) to check out a few sightseeing spots. We noticed on a map we had of the city that there were a few temples to the south grouped together. So we went through downtown to get there but stopped at this beautiful church (interestingly enough Christianity is the fastest growing religion in South Korea) to snap a few photos. We hit the hiking trail pretty hard, thinking that we’d find these temples easily. They were NOT grouped together nicely (as the map suggested) and it was a miniature adventure finding each one. The area where the temples were was called Namgosanseong Fortress and it was literally surrounded by a large stone wall on all sides. The hike was interesting and the view from the peak alone was worth the trip here.
