Ariel and proclaimed Thursdays "Discover Korea Day." We don't have to teach until 5 p.m. so we are free to romp around the city. After being here for over five months, we realized that we have not been taking advantage of the city. We don't go out exploring much. As a result, we have been living in a bubble amidst 11 million other people. There are tons of museums and beautiful places to visit in Seoul, and so far, we have seen about five of them. Yesterday was our first Discover Korea Day, and we chose to visit a buddhist temple, Jogyesa (조계 사). It was a beautiful haven in the city. Whenever I am at a temple, people are doing things that I don't understand. I always just observe, but yesterday a cute, old Korean man handed us inscence and we had to figure out what to do with it. We lit the inscence and walked over to a pagoda and stuck it with other inscence. I'm sure that we missed out on at least eight steps of things we were supposed to do with the inscence, but who knows.

We wandered around in a new part of the city and found a nice vegetarian restaurant. At the restaurant, we met a nice western monk. When using the toilet, I stumbled across a knitting store. This is the first knitting store that I have seen in Asia. I saw a sign and followed it into a huge knitting store. For a minute, I just stood in the doorway with my jaw dropped. There were walls of yarn and knitting books (in an array of languages) and I was very excited. That's what happens when you Discover Korea. You love it even more than you did before.