Religion in South Korea is an interesting thing. Most are not affiliated with any religion but of the approximately 40% who are, Buddhism and Christianity are at the top, but both only combine to make up 65% of the 40% or 26% of the total population. This is all according to Wikipedia.
However, from what I've seen Jesus is everywhere in this city. At night it's lit up like the red light district of most countries; a giant glowing cross in the scenery of the city. In Korea you don't have to look far to find Jesus.
Buddhism however, is everywhere else. It has influenced the architecture, culture, traditions, etc. Most things Koreans do have roots in Buddhism; and most Koreans that don't affiliate themselves with any religion still follow Buddhist practices. This leads to some interesting conflicts between Christianity and Buddhism, but that isn't the topic of this post. Instead this is about my trip to Seoul during Buddha's Birthday Weekend Bash.
I'm sure some people celebrated the birthday of Buddha with something holy, but it seemed as though most of the people I saw viewed it like any other holiday; especially wei-gooks. Myself and a group of my friends ventured up to Seoul for three days of exciting fun.
We stayed at a hostel where we met some interesting folks. There was a guy from England, Paul; Steve, from Maui who was traveling the world and showing off his six year beard; and Stefan from Norway, but he still sounded like an Englishman The hostel was pretty awesome, there was a few rooms full of bunk beds, almost all of our crew were in the same room. Joel and Jehan slept in the main room, and Jamie and Dylan stayed with their friend. It was a cool arrangement until K-pop (Kirill) kept waking everyone up at night with his incessant, unwieldy coughing fits.
We got to Seoul from Busan via the KTX (Korea Train Express), which is a high speed train that only took three hours to get up from the South to the North. It was a cool train, and I slept for almost the entire trip. The night before had been a going away party for our Korean boss, so we (Joel, Jehan and I) stayed up drinking until the wee hours of the morning. The rest of our crew went to bed on time, and woke up early enough to take a shower. The three of us crawled off the floor of the rented condo (for the party) and raced to the subway station at about 800, 30 minutes after the others left. My first day in Seoul was plagued with exhaustion and sleep deprivation, but I made the most of it and had a killer first day.
Below is a picture of the hostel with the people who were there when I took the picture--a little circular logic there. This was the living room area. The picture at the bottom is the best pic of the sleeping arrangement I could take. There were too many beds to be able to accurately represent with a picture--10 beds.
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