Seoul, the DMZ, and Cheonan

A few weeks ago four of us visited Seoul for a USO tour to the DMZ. Our tour was scheduled for Saturday the 5th, so we took the KTX up on Friday and stayed at Jin Guest House. The next morning we grabbed breakfast on the run and were at Camp Kim by a few minutes after 7am. We checked in, boarded the buses and set off for the northern border.

We signed our life away (the first sentence in the Visitor’s Declaration wavier: “The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and the possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.”) and started the tour. Here’s an overview of what we saw:

+ The Joint Security Area, or Panmunjeom, the only place in the DMZ where North and South Koreans face off on a daily basis. It is where diplomatic talks take place and we could see things like the Bridge of No Return, where POWs were returned after the Korean war; the site of the Axe Murder Incident; and the ‘world’s most dangerous golf course’, a one-hole course surrounded on three sides by live minefields. South and North Korean civilians are not allowed inside the JSA so we were escorted on this part of our tour by an American soldier stationed in Camp Bonifas (which is in the JSA).

+ Dora Observatory, which is the closest you can get to the North – you can use the coin-operated binoculars and see North Korea’s propaganda village, Kijong-dong, and the city of Kaesong, where North and South Koreans work together in the joint industrial complex.

+ Inside the Third Infiltration Tunnel, one of four tunnels that have been discovered so far (it is believed that there are several more undiscovered tunnels) that were dug by the North for use in a surprise attack on the South.

+ Dorasan Station – “Not the last station from the South, but the first station toward the North” which was used for transporting supplies to Kaesong in the North and the finished products back to the South. The border is closed now but in the event of reunification Dorasan Station will be used again.

Even given the recent tensions between North and South Korea after the sinking of the Cheonan warship, this tour wasn’t really scary, just very surreal and a bit tense. We had to observe a dress code and even behavioral codes in some places – walk in two straight lines, no pointing, waving, or other gestures, and no pictures allowed in several places, even from the bus windows.

I was left with two main impressions from the day. One is that North Korea is just weird. Some of their judgments are just so screwy. Like the constant attempts to one-up South Korea and prove how much better they are: South Korea builds something in the JSA, and the North adds a faux third story to their own adjacent building so that it’s taller. The South puts up a flag pole in their village in the DMZ, Daeseong-dong, and the North puts up a taller one in their village, with a flag so big that it can barely wave even in a gale (it’s the world’s tallest flagpole, at 160 meters, and the flag itself weighs 600 pounds!) Anyway, this village – called Kijong-dong but better known as Propaganda Village in the West – is weird enough even without that flag. North Korea maintains that it is fully inhabited with schools, hospitals, etc. but no one actually lives there. Lights regularly go on and off and people clean the streets but the buildings are all completely empty! They face loudspeakers toward the South and deliver Communist propaganda for hours every day. And those tunnels – the North denied digging them, but structurally it’s obvious that they were built from North to South. And when we visited the Third Infiltration Tunnel, we could see places where North Koreans had painted the tunnel walls black to support their story that they were mining coal, even though there isn’t any coal in the area! And finally, a South Korean I know told me something that he saw when he completed his military service in the DMZ: the North can’t afford tractors for their farm work, but to keep up the pretense that they’re a rich country, they would have one tractor come out once a day and make a lap around the field! There are so many weird stories like that.

The other impression that I got from the DMZ, and also from the Independence Hall we visited later, is just how sad it is that this country is split. I’ve always thought about them as two separate countries, and I guess right now that’s what they are. But only a bit more than 50 years ago they were one country, with one homogenous population, until they were divided by outside powers. Especially considering how far the South has come in the last few decades, both economically and democratically, just imagine how powerful it would be today as one country twice its current size, with twice the working population and resources. It’s really depressing to compare the two now and imagine what could have been.

We arrived back in Seoul around 3pm (the border is only an hour away from the capital). We headed straight for the Changdeok Palace complex. Since we got there so late in the afternoon we didn’t have nearly enough time to see everything. We made a beeline for something called the Biwon Secret Garden, and arrived at the entrance just in time to buy tickets for the last tour of the day. A tour is the only option for seeing the Garden so we didn’t even care that it was in Korean. It was different than we expected – not really like a Western garden, but more like a huge grotto. We had a two-hour tour through beautiful roads and enormous ancient trees. There were also a few old buildings used by the royal family and a really pretty pond. We kept walking and walking, saying ‘Where’s the garden?’ and didn’t figure out until the end that we were in it the whole time.

The next morning, Sunday, we got on the train and headed south to a suburb of Seoul called Cheonan. We spent the entire day at the Independence Hall of Korea. This is a huge history museum – there are eight buildings plus several outdoor memorials and statues. One building was closed when we were there, but we managed to get through all seven of the others before almost missing our train back to Daegu. One exhibit was about prehistoric Korea up through the end of the Joseon dynasty in 1910, but all of the others dealt with the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) and Korea’s movement for independence from Japan. It was a really good museum – at least as interesting and informative as the DMZ – and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Korea. This part of Korean history is really interesting because it’s still relevant, and affects feelings between Korea and Japan even today. I won’t write it here, but if you’re curious, email me and I’ll tell you what one of my middle schoolers said to me about Japan.

So that was probably the most productive weekend I’ve had in a long time – we knocked out three major touristy things and I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends the whole time. I’m so lucky to have an awesome huge group of fiends here; even when we have insane long hot weekends like that we’re always laughing and having a good time. This post is long enough so I didn’t include pictures, but here’s the link if you have the time! http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/SeoulDMZBiwonIndependenceHall?feat=directlink