Barbara & Bruces' Asia Adventures continue (China, Hong Kong and Korea too!!!!)

We had the opportunity to visit Korea for the first time in mid-summer.  We've been going to places in China for the last several years, and now Barbara was invited to do workshops in areas related to her work in marriage and dance therapy in Korea.  I was the "trailing spouse," to explore life and culture, both with her and wandering about on my own.   One starting place was the Jogyesa Buddhist Temple near our hotel, at left, which drew us back several times. We found Seoul, Korea's capital, to be a modern city of 10 million.  This wasn't surprising--we've often found cities in east Asia fast-growing and often dazzling in design.  But Seoul (and much of Korea) had been devastated by war on its own territory as late as the 1950's, and needed to rebuild.  And it had become one of the "Asian Tigers" in recent decades, and had enough resources to engage in that rebuilding. The view over part of Seoul above (photo above) was out of our ...

Yin Yang- the Importance of Balance/Harmony We have been back about 2 weeks, my/our jet lag has abated, I no longer have to remind myself to make sure there is enough- or any- toilet paper before squatting or sitting.  And  that it is now perfectly fine (in fact expected) to put the used paper into the toilet itself, rather than the handy wastepaper basket that is usually near-by. (Cultural note, while the term ‘toilet’ might be considered a bit too ‘personal’ in the US, it is the English term used in China.. .and perhaps not as confusing as the term ‘bathroom’ that is used in the US).   We were welcomed back home by unusual and extremely hot weather combined with horrible air quality, although I suspect our time in Beijing made it seem not quite as intense, in comparison (sometimes distant buildings visible the day before had disappeared into the smoggy air by the next day).  I have been continuing my learning and reading about cultural differences betw...

China has changed so much in the past several generations, since 1949: first, wrenching social, political, economic, and family changes under Mao, until his death in 1976.  Then the "opening up" of China from 1978 to now, when China grew from a poor country to the second largest economy in the world, and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while becoming a key power in exporting its products to much of the world (including the U.S., raisin  U.S. concern about trade and deficits with China in political debates today).  How has this affected the dreams of the young? The painting at right (in the Shanghai History Museum) depicts (perhaps in a rather nostalgic and idealistic sense) the work of young women in the cotton weaving and cloth industry which was a key part of Shanghai's economic strength in earlier times.  In this past generation, young women (often those who've left the rural villages and farms) are still important in the now-industrial...

I'm trying to sort through what religious faith and practice play in China.  Are there practices and beliefs and traditions in which people take pride?  Which the government discourages, even seeks to suppress--or at least tries to manage?  Which though banned may be growing? Here I'll try to share more of my questions and experiences than my answers; I have more of the former than the latter. At left is the Dongyue Temple here in Beijing, the largest Taoist Temple in northern China.  Taoism is said to have become an organized philosophical and religious system several centuries before the "Common Era" or Christian Era, growing out of earlier indigenous Chinese traditions of shamanism and beliefs about human relationships with the natural world.  In this photo above, we see a very old tree, over half a millennium old, on which people in a Chinese tour group are leaving small red wooden markers with prayer requests. What drew my attention in particular...