Dinner with SJ, Seoul and North Korea

Technically, I was in two countries on Sunday. Shaina, Eunice, Amanda and I finally made the long trek to the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) that is the smudged line between North and South Korea. But before I dive into that tale, let's take a refresher on humble life in Daegu.

Living abroad is a different animal than traveling. I frequent the same grocery store, coffee place and vegetable stand daily. At E-Mart, the sample lady in the tofu section knows me by name and always gives me thirds. Fruit vendors know me as the loopy foreigner who sometimes just wants to buy 1 banana; not 14. My point is, you can get stuck in a rut even in South Korea. And what a rut it has been these past few weeks! I have been unable to shake illness for two weeks now, my food poisoning segueing immediately into some type of flu or cold. When I am not converting my temperature from Celsius into Fahrenheit on my complimentary H1N1 glass thermometer from orientation, I am confusing my children as I try and enunciate "m" and "n" sounds with a stuffy nose.

One bright spot in my week was finally getting to meet SJ's mother. SJ lives alone with her mom about 7 subway stops away from me. One way or another, SJ's mom was never able to invite me over although I have the suspicion that she was just nervous about meeting a foreigner. Regardless, I followed SJ home on a Wednesday night to meet momma and have some Korean food. mom definitely treated me right with japchae (noodles made from the starch of sweet potatoes, nicknamed "glass noodles"), sesame spinach, spicy tofu, pin-zized anchovies, radish and homemade kimchi. Let me pause on the kimchi!!! Right now, Koreans across the country are busy slathering cabbages with anchovy paste and red chili spice, stuffing them into large ceramic pots and burying them in the ground. Koreans eat kimchi with every meal, so this is a LOT of cabbage, and they are making a year's supply. Now, where do you store all of that kimchi? In a kimchi refrigerator, of course!! SJ led me to an office-type room at the back of their apartment and laughed as I gawked at their shiny, brand-spanking-new kimchi fridge. And that is the correct name: "kimchi fridge" as made obvious by the dancing cabbage cartoon characters on the doors. It's a special, air-tight temperature controlled fridge with massive bins designed specifically for storing the spicy, femrented cabbage. SJ's mom strapped me down with about 8 pounds of kimchi before I left and I will never be able to finish it before I leave Korea!



Our train to Seoul left at 8:20 in the AM. When we arrived, our first order of business was to stake out a love hotel and then navigate Seoul's fiercely confusing subway system to the Han River. Fast forward 3 hours of subway transfers and walking, we finally found the river and a stand where you could rent either 2-seater or single seat bikes for 3,000 won. Shaina and Eunice rocked the 2-seater and crashed into everything from streetlamps to a few close calls with Korean children while Amanda and I played it safe with normal bikes. My only issue was even with the seat raised to it's highest point, my legs were jutting out at the sides like stork legs because Korean bikes are tailored for much shorter people. We pedaled around the river, racing and having a good time and all of us were only too tickled to warm up in our hotel rooms and grab some dinner afterward.



The next day we had to meet bright and early with Adventure Korea, a tour group that organizes trips to the DMZ. We loaded onto a charter bus, Dunkin Donuts coffees in hand, and rode for an hour to a small city that was built specifically for that fated day when North and South Korea will supposedly reunite. The city boasts a theme park called "Peace Land", has a few Western restaurants and several watchtowers with free binoculars so you can look out across the border into North Korean territory. But if the border can be described in a word, it's eerie. There was no one there. The theme park was lit up with rides twirling and spinning and not a soul around to ride them. The shops were empty and with an overcast, snowy sky the whole place looked depressing and desolate. This wasn't even the actual border yet, either!
Peace Land
This train was shot up by North Koreans and their allies as it tried to pass the border and now stands as a very chilling reminder of the violence that still lingers between the two halves of the country.
Just my bad sense of humor. As a public relations major... I can safely say that North Korea has a permanently damaged reputation and I would never want this dude's job.
A few of the barren shops I mentioned are behind me. One thing of note though- look at the sign above me and you will see a red hat society hat! I thought of Grandma P. when I saw this :)

After the Peace Land park, we drove up numerous squirrely mountain roads until we came to the actual border, peppered with camouflaged gun turrets and swarming with both U.S. and Korean soldiers. There were normal homes lining the streets, but I never saw a single person walking outside anywhere. We ate a nondescript lunch at a small restaurant and lingered in a few gift shops before walking to the DMZ museum, which (with sweeping generalizations and an overly-optimistic and happy tone) feeds you a select history of the Korean War. The museum glazed over the brutality that POWs faced and touched very lightly on the actual fighting. Instead the museum (and every other place we visited in the DMZ compound) seemed to be fixated on this hypothetical reunion day that is eventually coming. The museum highlighted peace negotiations currently underway (really!?!), the beautiful wildlife in Northern Korea and basically how everything is hunky dorey between the two countries. Weird!
Kimchi pots

The scariest part about the museum was the tunnel tour. There are 3 known tunnels that the North Koreans have dug that stretch from North Korea underground into South Korea. These tunnels are wide enough to transport the entire North Korean Army in a handful of hours...and South Korean military officials believe there are at least 22 tunnels still undiscovered. So every day they are drilling and poking around the border, hoping to unearth another tunnel and REALLY hoping that there aren't any more tunels being dug as I write this post..

We were allowed to walk down into the tunnel (but all of our cameras were locked up) It was incredibly steep and damp. Our hard hats were constantly scraping the rocky ceiling above us and we all had to completely fold over at the waist to walk. Terrifying to think there are potentially tunnels even bigger and deeper then the one we toured hidden all across the border.
They turned North Korean citizens into friendly little cartoon characters. 0.o

I wish I could show you pictures of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea... but pictures were not allowed. We drove to the top of a mountain that sevred as an observatory for tourists to come and catch a glimpse of North Korea's capital city. We were allowed to take photos up until this thick yellow line and then the soldiers would confiscate our cameras if we stepped past the line to look into the binoculars. What I can tell you is I have never seen a city so still. It was like the movie "I Am Legend". There were no moving cars, no people walking outside. There were no lights on in buildings and no sounds of honking or planes flying overhead. The only noteable thing about the city was the enormous, life-like (fat belly and all) statue of Kim Jong Il sitting in the middle of the city.

I was on my tip-toes trying to get a decent shot.

By far the pinnacle of oddness though was the train station. The last stop on the tour, Dorasan train station was hands down disconcerting and uncomfortable. It's a fully-functional, fully-staffed, brand new train station complete with ticket taking counters, snack bars and bathrooms. And get this: it goes absolutely nowhere. The train tracks stop within a few feet of the border. Dorasan was constructed as a goodwill offering in the hopes that one day South Koreans will be able to freely travel up into North Korea again.

No trains..
It was a creepy day. Before catching our trian back to Daegu, we decided to splurge and eat at Bennigans for some second-rate albeit still tasty "Western" food. I had a $35 salad and about 3 baskets of bread and thought it was worth every dollar :)


To end on a less unsettling note, here is a picture of what you typically see on a Korean subway: people collapsing everywhere since Koreans can't seem to stay awake on public transportation.