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=0=| We also went on a market tour, including the night market which is shown here. It seems to have been quite popular with tourists and was also known as the snake market (for obvious reasons). This is a picture of a cobra with his trainer in the background. You can also see a boa constrictor in the background. There many snakes of a wide variety. Snakes were considered to have many medicinal properties and so this would be considered their pahrmacy with many drinks and mixtures made with various parts of the snakes including the skin, blood, etc.. We also saw them skin a frog (and I thought I had enough of that in High School biology). It was quite interesting. |
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| We also visited a temple at night. Here is one individual who was visiting the temple. He would be standing facing the Buddha image about twenty feet away and would stand there for about ten seconds bending slightly at the waist and waving the incense stick and then leave the incense stick in the run shown. |
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| As you enter a temple, directly in front of you are the images of Buddha, but if you enter and then turn around, to the left or right would be something that looks like a souvenir shop. It would be run by the monks who live at the temple and help support the monks and the temple (we presumed). There were souvenirs for the tourists, of course, but also incense and such for the local patrons as well as items for the shrines that most Buddhist would keep in their home. In Thailand the shrine would be in the garden, but in Taiwan the shrines would be kept in the home. |
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| This was the central image of Buddha in this temple. In this temple there was a barrier between the Buddha and the visitors. You can see a Buddhist monk to the right. |
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| The end of the night tour was a Chinese opera. It was a highly stylized form of opera. The woman, for example has sleeves that if she weren't holding them would reach to the floor and about three feet beyond. She would use these sleeves and their movement to convey various things, all of which were beyond us. They were also singing in a high pitched sing song fashion that also didn't convey much to us, but presumably was meaningful to those familar with the art. We only stayed about five minutes, which before we went on the tour seemed a little short. However, after about five minutes we were ready to go though the opera lasted for about two hours. At the start fo the tour we had dinner at a Mongolian Barbecue restaurant which, in Korea, was known as Bool Go Ki (which literally translates as Fire Meat). |
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| Our next tour was a tour of the seashore. Our first stop was to the top of a mountain where there was a temple with a really large statue of Buddha. This statue was hollow with stairs inside so that you could climb to the very top. If you notice just above the stomach their is a dark spot which is actually a person head. We imagine this is similar to the statue we had seen previously where there was a smaller image coming out of the chest. What the meaning is, we still don't know, but this seems to be the same theme. |
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| So the tour continued on to the shore and here is a really pretty view of the shoreline. We also stopped a section of the shore which was sandstone with softer stone below so that there were many odd shaped rocks which looked like mushrooms to me (shown below). It looked like we were going to stay there about fifteen minutes looking at the rocks, but after a couple of minutes I had seen enough rocks. However, off to the right there was a rock that looked a lot like the Rock of Gibraltor with a path up it. Alright! |
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| So we started off to see how far we could get in eight minutes. The path started off wide and well kept, but by the time you got to the first level it got pretty narrow as you can see here. This concludes the pictures from Taiwan. Our favorite trip in Taiwan was when we just took a train from Taipei headed South along the West coast. After an hour or so we got off in a medium sized town and just walked around the town. We saw a shop were they were making Christmas lights (we bought just the components for white and blue lights which we thought looked cooler than traditional many colored lights) and put them together ourselves (they thought we were a little crazy). We also visited a shop where wood carvings were being made. I came to appreciate the difference between hand crafted items and actual art. The shop made numerous items by hand, each of which was almost idnetical to the other. There were subtle differences between each, but the difference was not the result of artistic interpretation, but just random chance. We really enjoyed being on our own the most and so took less tours (perhaps no more). However, the pictures I took were quite the normal tourist shots, none of the shops we visited, which is sad. Hopefully later pictures will be better. |
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| These are MAC (or Military Airlift Command) flights and C-140's. It could be the airbase in Okinawa, Taiwain, or the Phillipines. We may never know which they are. We took a MAC flight from Daegu to Okinawa as there were three flights a week and they were most convenient (if we missed a flight we just went home). From Okinawa there was only one flight a week to Taiwan. It was all full and not for three days, so we took a civilian flight to Taiwan. Once in Taiwan the return flight to Okinawa wasn't leaving for a week so we signed up for it. That was a safe bet as we could enjoy ourselves for a week and then were at the head of the queue (the seats were assigned according to the order you signed up with priority given to duty travel, etc.). From Okinawa we got a flight easily headed back to Seoul. However, the train was hard to get. We were advised we would have a better time getting a train if we took the bus to a town just South of the Seoul. When we got there, we discovered it was the same train and all seats were already full. Blah! The next train wasn't for four or five hours so we took that train anyway, standing for most of the three or four hour trip (which wasn't the most fun). |
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This page was last updated on October 1, 2005.
