You're making us all look bad

A few weeks ago I got the chance to stay overnight at a Buddhist temple.  This was cool for many reasons.
1.  It's a Buddhist temple and although I'm sure those exist in America, I do not know of one in my hometown area.
2.  I got to see many foreigner friends that live in different towns who I hadn't seen since orientation.
3.  It was free!  Holla!

I learned a lot from the experience and am glad that I went.  We did chanting, bowing, made a paper lotus flower, had a traditional Korean tea ceremony, walked in the woods, climbed a mountain, toured the temple, and just generally chilled out.  Most every person that was there gladly joined in on everything and did what was asked of us.  But there was one person who didn't.

One of the activities on our itinerary was to wake up at 3:00am and doing morning chants and then do 108 full prostrate bows.  Obviously any activity that requires waking up that early doesn't sound like a mega fun time, but it was part of the experience so everyone did it and really no one complained.  We were guests at this temple and did our best to respect the people, culture, and religion there.  So everyone woke up, chanted, and then walked back to the main hall where we were going to do our 108 bows.  And as we walked into the hall, all of the foreigners and the Buddhist nun who was leading us through everything, we turned on the light and there, in the middle of the room, was one man.

Sleeping.

That's right.  Instead of waking up with everyone else at 3:00am, he decided to sleep on a pile of a billion pillows right in the middle of the room directly underneath the Buddha.  It was humiliating.  The guy mumbled some stuff about being sick the previous week and then got up and went who knows where.  Everyone else in the room just exchanged uncomfortable looks and then got ready to do the bows.  Later we talked about how we couldn't believe he didn't show up and how embarrassing that was for all of us.  Craziness.

That story wasn't that great.  But it does demonstrate how some foreigners here do things that make the rest of us all look bad.  No worries though, because we all ended up on TV!  Here's the link of the video.  You can see the clothing we wore (so crazy comfortable) and you can even see me!  I'm in the corner at some point in time and wearing glasses.

http://news.kbs.co.kr/society/2012/10/15/2551398.html