Gurye From A Mountaintop Temple

Where there's a mountain, there's probably a temple, as a general rule of thumb, and some have some pretty excellent views looking over the town or countryside. I had planned to take Saturday to hike up to one of the larger temples in the area, up the mountain in the national park, but due to a pretty insane storm that the day started out with, that was postponed. Instead I took a short hike up to one of the lookouts in our small town of Gurye with a couple of the other foreigners, since it's a lot more easily accessible and therefore not a big deal if we got caught in another storm. Gurye looks a lot bigger than it often feels, so for me at least, it was interesting to get a different perspective on it.

The temples here are all intricately painted

Once you get to the top of the mountain, and even in certain places along the way, there's a variety of exercise machines that are open to the public to use. They're pretty much all unique to Korea from what I've seen, and exactly what it is you're supposed to do with them is dubious. I should have taken pictures, but I've gotten used to seeing them (they're scattered throughout every town and city, here and there) so I didn't think to. One only seems to turn you upside down for some reason, to no real effect other than throwing off your sense of equilibrium. Another you just lay back over a curved metal surface and sort of, I don't know, lay there a bit, maybe look at the clouds for a while and dream of the six pack abs that it definitely won't help you attain.