Happy Birthday to Bu(ddha)

Last weekend was a really eventful one. It actually felt like about 2 weekends within one. Well, actually it was a long weekend of three days, so it was more like 2 weekends in a weekend and a half. Still, an eventful weekend.

It started Thursday night when the band was supposed to play a show. We unfortunately found out an hour before we were supposed to play that they weren't expecting us to play a show that night. Some kind of gap in communications. We were pretty upset and ended up drinking kind of a lot.

This becomes important because our singer Jake ended up setting up a show for us just down the street. So we called all of our friends over there and played a set with the three of us in the band being pretty hammered, and it didn't go extremely well. There were definitely a lot of missed notes, words, and some timing issues. It could have been worse, but we got a lot of sympathy comments which stung a little.

So with that over with, the next day, Friday, was a holiday in Korea because it's Buddha's birthday. I don't really know a lot about this holiday, but I still headed to Seoul to meet my friend Megan and her sister to go to a lantern lighting in honor of Buddha's birthday.

Our plan was to go on the bus tour, so we met around that area and there were a lot of fountains. I ran through one.

There was also this giant silhouette of a woman hammering something, which was cool.

And some strange giant shoe made out of a bunch of regular sized shoes:

The bus tour was booked for the rest of the day, so we decided to just play some frisbee and then walk along the river to where the temple is. Here's a picture of Megan and her sister Becky along the river walk.

So we walked over to Insadong where the Jogyesa Temple is for the lighting ceremony. They have a whole bunch of lanterns kind of like being under a tent or something. Next to the temple there were some monks and some women all bowing in front and then a man who did a chant for about an hour. There were even little boy monks who were super cute. One fell asleep and had to be carried away.

At the temple was this cutesy looking Buddha statue with happy anime eyes.

People were filing into the temple for something, but I'm not sure what it was.

We had gotten there a little after seven, and the lantern lighting happened after sunset. So we were waiting there until after 8 o'clock listening to a man doing chanting and a lot of people were singing with, but we didn't know what they were singing about. Finally, the lanterns were lit and and everyone was happy.

So actually the most exciting part of the night was after this ceremony when we went to this little hof (drinking place) called Johannes Brahms, themed after the composer. We ordered a bottle of wine. As the woman was at the bar opening our bottle, Megan says "Oh my god, there's something on her leg!" Megan had watched something run across the floor and up the woman's leg. I looked over, and it was this giant hideous cockroach bigger than my thumb. It continued running all up and down the woman's leg and we decided to let her know about it. So she inspected her leg and the roach ended up running up the woman's shirt. She finally saw it, and freaked out and brushed it off of her. At this point the cockroach ran behind a shelf directly behind my chair.

We all looked at each other, startled at this event, and Megan says "you guys, chug the wine we have to get out of here." I was a little freaked and couldn't drink anything for a few minutes, but eventually was able to down a glass. Another woman in the bar went to the bathroom and on the way back the roach was following her to her seat. It was a super aggressive Korean cockroach.

We stood up as if to leave and the lady just packaged our bottle for us to take it home. We got out of there as quickly as possible, but the lady still charged us for these nuts that we orded and didn't have time to eat. That stung a little bit, but at least we made it out of the bar without being attacked.