where cider meets condensed milk: It's Koreal: DMZ.

where cider meets condensed milk

Monday, April 02, 2007

It's Koreal: DMZ.

In a nutshell, Korea-too-quickly was awesome. My first goal was to see the DMZ, which is very famous and very heavily guarded and very creepy. "M*A*S*H" was set during the Korean war, which makes up most of my previous knowledge of that time period, and all I remember from the show is that one of the guys was a cross-dresser. Not so useful. En route to the DMZ, our bus tour guide was wise-cracking and making remarks about Kim Jong-Il, even as soldiers with large guns were checking our passports. It takes about an hour from Seoul, and the video we were shown was set up mostly as a Good versus Evil account of the war, complete with Good music (triumphant or sad to represent the South) and Bad Evil music (minor key, lots of drums to represent the North), and accusations of the Chinese entering the war "illegally" when the battlefront arrived at their borders.

James and the Giant Peace? (No, that was painful. Sorry. But I bet Dad thinks it's funny.) Picture-taking was highly restricted, especially inside the 3rd infiltration tunnel. We all wore helmets in the tunnel, and had to walk, crouching down, for half a kilometre, after descending to 80 metres below ground. They said that, had the tunnels been completed, the North could have moved 30,000 armed troops through in an hour. I banged my head against the ceiling 5 times, and I imagine that running, fully armed, would have been a bit more difficult.

Before entering the tunnel, we watched another movie, but this was focused on reunification/peace/chipmunks and much less about finger-pointing at the North. It opened with a little girl prancing through fields, and then there were bombs and the ground splits open and everything is wrapped with computer-image barbwire and she cries. Insert Darth Vader's theme song, some more bad computer images, a short history of the tunnels and how they were discovered, and why the Korean people want (and need!) peace. Cut to a long section about the wonderful nature preserve that has been created by the DMZ (no people, no pollution), filled with chipmunks and rare birds. It finished with the same girl crying in a field, but this time she sees butterflies flapping in the breeze above the barbwire jungle, and computer-image trees explode from the ground. Another chipmunk montage, happy music, and the ground mends itself. This is the "sunshine policy" dream for the future.

There is a beautiful train station at Dorasan, which one day will take trains to Pyeongyang, but for now is just a photo-op for tourists and bored soldiers. I wanted to visit Panmunjeom, which is the peace village in North Korea where negotiations occur, but the brochure said you can't do the tour if you're wearing jeans. However, everyone on our tour that continued was in jeans, so maybe it didn't matter. Too bad! Our last stop was a viewpoint of North Korea, but it was too misty to see much. The South Korean peace village in the DMZ erected a huge flagpost, and the North Korean village retaliated with an even bigger flagpost. But, we were told that they used cheap, heavy material, so the flag won't flap unless it's really windy. The South uses only the most expensive fabric, so it flaps in any breeze and has to be replaced every 2 months at a cost of $2,000. Sunshine policy, perhaps, but ego knows no borders.

posted by Raychaa @ 9:51 AM

1 comments:

At 8:54 PM, Anonymous said…

Our tour with the USO went to Panmunjon and most of us wore jeans!!!