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Mungyong is in the central part of
Korea.
It has a lot of natural beauty and there are no big cities. There is a "City
Hall for the county and if you speak Korean, you can visit the Mungyong
City Hall Homepage.It's a kind of county but they call it a "city".
The people, population 65,000 are self-reliant, diligent, and kind-hearted,
as it says in the museum at Mungyong Sejae, a famous park. The school where
I teach is in a town of 30,000 called Chom
Chon. This area not so long ago was known as a coal mining region. Now,
the only thing remaining of that industry is a museum. There are some beautiful
Buddhist
temples in the area, several are excellent Son, or Zen meditation monasteries.
They are surrounding by green hills and occasional peeks of 1,000 meters
high. Christianity has made plenty of in-roads and spires can be seen in
all the towns and in the countryside too. The countryside has many apple
and pear orchards. There are several famous potteries here too. New highways
are constantly under construction making travel time between Mungyong and
the big cities like Seoul and Taegu, shorter and shorter. It is the intractable
nature of the mountains that has closed off these rural areas for so long.
What used to take 40 minutes to go the next town by car now takes less than
ten because of a new tunnel through the mountain.    |
My friend Robert Koehler has also created a web site about Munkyong and Korean culture. He is an english teacher too. That's his picture, with fellow English teacher John Peters, under the the rock cut Buddha. A good friend of mine, Dr. Frank M. Tedesco, is one of Korea's greatest Buddhist scholars and I made this rudimentary homepage for him and his amazing work.
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See Korea Net for Info in English about Korea |
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