Coconut Travels to Korea Part 2

 While we were in Seoul we stayed in a tall building with a lot of apartments in it.  There were lots and lots of tall buildings full of apartments in Seoul.  They looked like bee hives.  That's not the way people always lived in Korea.

The first day we walked around our neighborhood we found something different.  It was right in the middle of the city, but Grandma said it looked just like houses used to look when she was growing up.  She said that when she was little most houses were made out of mud bricks with straw roofs, just like this one.  The heat came up through the floor.  Nobody was in the house.  I think it was there so that people would remember how it was in the old days.  Grandma said that when she was a little girl she helped make houses in her village by stomping on the mud that was put in a wooden frame to make the bricks.  Then when the house was built and it was time to harvest the rice, everybody in the village helped to tie the rice straw together to make the roof.  Her story reminded me of the story about the three little pigs who built their houses out of sticks and straw.  I wonder if the Korean kids know that story.

Korean people eat a lot of rice.  We ate it three times a day.  Rice needs a lot of water to grow.  The wooden wheel in the picture helped move
the water from the stream or the ditch into the rice field.  Grandma said they made the wheel turn by walking on the wooden steps.  Another day, when we were traveling out of the city, I saw somebody actually walking on one of those wheels.  It really did pump water for the rice.

Next we saw some tall scary looking faces.  I was a little scared, but Grandpa held me and I felt better.  Grandma said the posts were made scary to keep the evil spirits away.  When I found out that the scary faces were there to protect me they weren't so scary any more. The oldest religion in Korea is Shamanism.  That means that people believe in  spirits.  They believe that spirits live in everything, even trees and rocks.  They need the scary faces to keep the bad spirits from hurting them.

Korea has a lot of religions.  One is Buddhism.  Buddhist believe that when you die you might come back as some other kind of animal.  They don't eat any kind of animal, only plants.  They don't kill any animals either, not even mosquitos.  I don't know if I could be a Buddhist or not.  It was Buddha's birthday that day.  There were lots of pretty colored lanterns hanging in front of Buddhist temples.

Lots of Koreans are Christians, too.  We met some Korean Christians who told us about their work, but that's a lot more stories.  I'll tell you more about that later.