The morning after we arrived at Ungbikwan, our dorm condominium, we took a walk around the campus to orient ourselves. Important as it was to walk the campus, the walk itself was disorienting. We did a lot of circular wandering.
It did not help that it was graduation day, so a great many of the people on campus were visitors who had little more idea of where things were located than we did. Even without the language barrier asking for help would have been a problem.
All we knew about campus, our new neighborhood, as we walked was that our dorm sits at the top of the hill. So, when it was time to go "home" we were confident we could get there by heading uphill. Easy enough to remember, although the climb remains, well, a climb.
Looking for places, the Humanities Building, for example, was difficult in part because many buildings have a similar look and because signs are in Korean. English names do appear below many hangul letters, but they are often small, frequently puzzling, and occasionally hard to find.
On the way back up to our dorm that first day, I noticed a traditional tile roof partially hidden in the trees a hundred feet off the road. Both the location of the roof and several other details led me to think it might be a Buddhist temple or shrine. I remarked that we would need to walk down the path to see what was there in the next day or so.
Last week I decided to the time had come so I walked down the little path. Sure enough, beside the building with the traditional roof was a ten foot stone Buddha and, behind it, a garden.
So my initial suspicions were confirmed, but what surprised me was the eating area above the shrine. It is similar to the outdoor eating areas one finds all over these hills. All this time I had thought there must be a trail head onto the mountain, but all this time people were just coming to eat.
I did not go all the way down into the eating area, because that usually draws out the proprietors, the women who run these eating houses, to greet you -- even if you are only passing through. More than that, however, I wanted to get closer to the shrine since there was no access from the path I was on.
Further down the road from my dorm are steep stairs that lead into a residential neighborhood. Many students go up and down these stairs, but I had never done so. I went down thinking it would give me access to the shrine.
At the bottom of the stairs, just 150 feet from the sidewalk at the edge of campus that I know so well now is a different world -- small houses, tall apartments, well-tended gardens, and narrow streets.
Getting to the shrine was not as straightforward as I had anticipated, but eventually I got there. It is not as public a place as I thought it might be. The buildings were all closed up and there were no signs that visitors were encouraged. The pilgrims I had seen were not pilgrims after all, just hungry souls looking for a meal, a conversation, and a bit of relaxation.
Turns out not to be a big find, but at least it is no longer like so many other places I always intended to visit but never did.
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