The Korean Peninsula Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)

There are many companies that offer tours of the DMZ - the four kilometer thick demilitarized zone that is the de facto border between the People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) - but all of them operate through the US army. This is because the 'demilitarized' zone is actually the most militarized border in the world, and visits are taken exceedingly seriously.

If you look closely, you can see a North Korean soldier in front of the building's doors.

I - like all the tourists - treated the soldiers with extra cultural sensitivity and respect since we were at the most tense location in the country. Yep, that's definitely what we did. 

The soldiers all stood at perfect attention without moving. It honestly didn't seem like the best defense, but since the war is on indefinite ceasefire, I guess standing still like an easy target doesn't really matter.

The microphones down the center of this table are the official line between North Korea and South Korea at this point. That way, they can both negotiate from within their borders.

The grounds were meant to host peace summits, but North Korea didn't want to have talks somewhere built by the South and on their side of the Joint Security Area.

In the distance we could see a propaganda city, that among other things has an enormous flag pole in order to hoist a giant North Korean flag. I though this was all quite petty, and it seemed like our American soldier tour guide thought so too, until he bragged that the South Korean side build a bigger flag in response, in their own propaganda city. Sigh.

The Bridge of No Return was used for prisoner exchanges at the end of active hostilities. The bridge is most famous as the site of the Axe Murder Incident because of the murder of two U.S. Army officers who had been cutting down a 100 foot poplar tree that had been blocking a United Nations Command checkpoint's line of sight to the bridge. After the incident the bridge was no longer used. I most strongly associate it with the book I read by Simon Winchester about walking the entire length of South Korea. North Korea suggested he walk the rest of the peninsula, and he was tempted, though the U.S. military would probably not have actually permitted it. Thus, this bridge was the end of his journey.

There were soldiers performing drills within sight of the gift shop (which I didn't really want to go into because what is technically still an active war zone doesn't strike me as the place for kitschy souvenirs).

The next stop was a tour of a tunnel under the border. The tunnel was one of several discovered that North Korea had dug under the DMZ, in order to have the option of a quick surprise invasion that bypassed the well monitored and defended border. North Korea ludicrously claimed that the tunnel was dug by the South, despite the fact that the blasting pattern shows it was clearly dug from the North. The North then claimed that the tunnel was for mining coal, even though the geology is completely wrong for coal to be present.

The tunnel pretty much just looked like any other blasted out tunnel, and only its implications made it an interesting stop. That, and the weird, inappropriately theme park like decorations:

One piece of art there that I did like was of people working together to put together two half spheres, the faces of which were imprinted with one of the disputed countries in relief and the other in imprint, so that they would fit together perfectly. 

Next we went to a viewing platform to look into North Korea and to see a wide span of the DMZ. It was really just a long razor wire fence and some countryside. Landmines are hard to see. We weren't allowed to take pictures of the border for security reasons, so here's a picture of people looking at the border. 

And yet, for all that security, you can just hop on a train and ride out to Pyeongyang!

Okay, to be fair South Koreans cannot do so, and there is far too much security screening and passport inspection to say we just 'hopped on'.

Tune in next time for my surreal adventures in North Korea. 

...

Just kidding. There actually used to be tours of North Korea out of South Korea, and I have close friends who were able to go see the gorgeous Diamond Mountains. However, an older South Korean woman on one of the tours decided to go harvest herbs in a restricted area at three in the morning and the North Korean soldiers killed her, so they don't give tours anymore. I missed out by a few months, though I'm glad I wasn't on the tour with that incident. 

The fact that there are no longer tours to North Korea didn't prevent me from convincing a particularly gullible coworker that we had in fact crossed the border. She asked if the tour was going into North Korea, and I didn't miss a beat in telling her that we already were there. The soldiers out the window happened to be facing such that the South Korean flag patch was on the arm aimed away from us, and had on black armbands, so I claimed that they were North Korean soldiers. My coworker excitedly got out her camera to take pictures, and her camera was malfunctioning such that she thought all of her pictures were blank. I thus naturally told her that we must have passed through a strong electromagnet that erased all memory from electronic devices, set up by the North Koreans to prevent information from leaking about the country. I think that's about the point when my other coworkers on the tour couldn't help but break out laughing. We were actually at the train station pictured above. It was rather sad to see the beautiful rail system that lead from the southern tip of the peninsula and that extended all the way to Great Briton was blocked because of North Korea's anti-social behavior. We could get our passports stamped with an entry to North Korea here, but I thought it foolish to complicate future border crossings trying to explain that the stamp was official but not actually an indication that I had set foot in the rogue state. 

House of Sharing

One day at the end of August, Colleen, Becky, and I went to The House of Sharing. This is a place built as a home for the surving so-called "Comfort Women," the name given to the women used as sex slaves by the Japanese army during World War II.

The house is out in the barely populated hills outside of Seoul, a place without bus access or even fully paved roads, which I found surprising since the secondary purpose of the place is to raise awareness of the issue.

Every Wednesday since 1992, at least some of the surviving women and their supporters protest outside the Japanese embassy, demanding compensation for their hardship, as well as acknowledgement of what was done to them. At first the Japanese government denied that "comfort women" had ever existed, then claimed the thousands of women from numerous countries were volunteer prostitutes, then claimed that some rogue soldiers may have forced some of the women into being prostitutes. This is all despite clear evidence that the women were tricked into thinking that they would be getting jobs in factories, or were outright abducted, and this practice was a systematic practice across the Japanese military. Most Japanese citizens have no idea that these atrocities took place, and one of the main sources of tours of the House of Sharing is Japanese people who have stumbled across the information and want to apologize on behalf of their nation.

The visit was with a tour group that picked us up in Seoul and bused us out to the complex. Inside we saw a short video about the comfort women and a museum documenting what is known about their plight. Things that stood out were testimonies from women who were taken as girls who had yet to have their first periods, replicas of the cells where the girls and women were held, and especially the woodblocks with the names of the "comfort women" written upon them in the style of a menu in a Japanese restaurant.

The tour ended with us meeting a couple of the survivors, who are all of course quite old at this point. They had already provided their testimonies for videos and the museum, so they did not recount anything further for us. Instead of a question and answer session, we simply indulged one woman's request that we all sing. After what she'd been through, we were all happy to oblige.

Potential

Before I decided to come to Korea, I spent a long time deeply depressed due to my attempts to figure out what I was doing with my life. I was terrified of setting myself on a career path, and wanted to opt out of the whole system, and I think I'm beginning to be able to put into words why.
All the jobs I've ever wanted don't exist. As a child I was sure that starship commander, ambassador to an alien race, or robotics engineer would be available to me as career options. I've always known that I was more intelligent than those around me, and because of this I thought I had world-altering brilliance instead of recognizing the reality that I was very bright in a dull town and school system. My family and teachers always gushed over my potential. They seemed so confident that I would do something important and amazing, and they encouraged me with the oft told lie that I could be anything I wanted when I grew up with the result that I don't want any jobs that actually exist because they all fall lightyears short of my expectations. Now the times I spend sleeping in gutters are the highlights of my life. I have worked about a dozen shitty short term jobs to avoid having to face the fact that I will never explore the far reaches of the galaxy, or even live on the moon.

Another part of my dissatisfaction with careers is that I think that the current conception of jobs is growing ever more anachronistic. As far back as I can remember I have worked under the assumption that advances in technology and increases in population would make work unnecessary for most people. I think this is why I am so open to socialism: I think that in the near future there will be far less work that needs to be done than what would be sufficient to occupy people, and I don't like the idea of just inventing useless busywork to fill the ever growing gap. I have recently come to realize how unusual that assumption is, especially when talking to people a generation or two older than me. I have a tutor student who is the parent of one of the children at my school, and she was telling me about what a big problem old age was in Korea. People have been saving on the assumption of a shorter lifespan than the current average, and so they have come to need jobs in their old age, and there are no jobs available. The difference in our world views became clear to me as I was thinking how the problem was that society is stuck on the idea that people need to perform full time jobs in order to have their basic needs met when really we could all work less if we were willing to stop obsessing over careers and stop associating people's worths with their level of employment, whereas she saw the problem as being that people live too long now. With my assumption socialism seems nearly inevitable, with the only alternative being people doing things that were totally useless to themselves and others (and almost certainly devastatingly consumeristic). I'm beginning to see why many people have major issues with socialism since while I take it as a basic assumption to take into account whenever contemplating the future that there will be a massive gap between the work that needs to be performed and the available workers, the idea has clearly never even crossed their minds. It was one of those moments when I recognized a core assumption as what it was—an assumption—which let me recognize that it might not be shared.

In the meanwhile, though, I am performing the busywork of teaching English in a part of the world that will probably overtake the English speaking world in importance and prominence in the near future. However, I don't really think of myself as an English teacher, but as a world traveler, which is a job title that is probably as close as I can possibly come to living up to my childhood imaginings.

Update: I should mention that my musings on potential were influenced by this comic.

The point at which politics, twitter, and comic books meet

Given recent events, I have reevaluated twitter. I earlier rejected it as annoying, shallow, and stupid. I maintain that this is true in most cases. However, currently in Iran it is the only way to communicate with the outside world. The government has blocked most sites, from email servers to facebook, but the way twitter is routed it is difficult to trace and block without shutting down the whole internet (they have in fact slowed it down considerably to prevent people from uploading videos or pictures). It reminds me of a scene from my favorite graphic novel, Transmetropolitan (actually, maybe it's tied with The Watchmen, but that's beside the point), where the protagonist discusses the fact that creative use of technology is out pacing the attempts to regulate or control it.

Thus, while I still don't see why anyone would want anything to do with twitter in ordinary life, it has become an important part of resistance to oppressive regimes (Obama's state department even requested that twitter not take the site down for maintenance as scheduled so that Iranians could continue to send out information.) As Andrew Sullivan has been saying for the last few days, the revolution will be twittered.

Iran

If you haven't been following the Iranian (quite possibly stolen) election you should (I recommend Andrew Sullivan, Talking Points Memo, and Juan Cole). It's fascinating.

If nothing else, this is one of the most amazing photos I've seen taken in the last few years:(hat tip Sullivan)

Reason #317 Portland is Awesome: Earl Blumenauer

Conservative (and for reasons unknown highly respected) columnist George Will, who pens opinions from a magical land free from research or fact checking, took the time to slander our good city of Portland in Newsweek. Representative Earl Blumenauer is having none of it. (Thanks to Matt Yglesias for the best analysis and refutation of Will's article.)

Neil Conway in Daejeon

A Canadian singer songwriter, Neil Conway, gave an intimate concert in Jeff and Maddie's apartment last Saturday night. Neil is on a tour through Asia, and stopped by Daejeon because he wanted to visit someone, though his tour got pushed back so she has actually since left the country and my provincial city of 1.5 million somehow stayed on the itinerary. Mr. Conway has a broader range of musical interest and playing styles than anyone I've ever heard of. He mostly played humorous folk music for us, which was to my liking, but when he has a band with him he also plays funk, metal, reggae, rap, and hip hop. He is from Newfoundland, and so are two of the English teachers I know here, so it was funny to see the three of them interacting, since even other Canadians think that Newfie slang and expressions are weird.

Some of my favorite lines of the evening were:

"This next song is a sing along... it has a Satanic chant that we can all do together."

and

"I ate the president, tasted like chicken... my favorite dish is Republican pot pie..." (there were a lot of songs about American politics, particularly about Bush).

I also enjoyed a song where the refrain is about being broke and eating crackers and sardines. If you ever saw one of the packages I got from my eccentric grandmother you understand why this struck close to home. I lived on kippered herring and crackers for my last month in Portland since I wanted to eat the food that I had rather than buy new food, and my grandmother sends odd (but greatly appreciated) care packages.

The song with the greatest resonance for me was one about vainly trying to make a new city feel like home.

After the concert we all chatted for a few hours and then went to a Noraebong (Karaoke room) for an hour. Having a professional musician in attendance surprisingly did not change the experience much, though Neil did freestyle over a few songs, which we certainly don't usually do. After that I biked home. Thankfully this weekend was less involved and less photo oriented than the last one. I don't think I could handle another post of that length.

My Renn Fayre in Seoul

Sadly I missed the actual Renn Fayre due to being in the wrong hemisphere, but I had something of an approximation at the Hi Seoul festival for my three day weekend. (By the way, Stacia's photos made me miss the hell out of you all.) Ok, there's no real substitute for Renn Fayre, but this was way closer than one would expect.

Buddha's birthday was on Saturday, so we had Friday, though apparently all the festivities for the holiday took place the Sunday before Buddha's birthday. Who knew? On Friday, John, Will, and I took the slow train to Suwon, a smallish city South of Seoul. We didn't have seats, so we had to stand in the food car, which also had video game stations, karaoke rooms, and drunk middle-aged men, and hence that car of the high speed train was the epitome of Korea. We weren't as hobocore as this guy:

We were in Suwon primarily to see the fortress wall that surrounds the center of the city. The city recognized that the wall is one of its major draws, judging by even the fences being shaped like the wall.

We walked from the train station to the wall along a ridge with good views of the city:

The wall itself had periodic outposts and 'secret gates', which were quite visible. Also, it was awesome.

People were actually allowed to ring this rather old bell, which felt like it shook us to the core.

 

Within the walls there was an old palace in the valley between well protected hills.

The outposts had nice view of the wall running through the city:

I was a fan of the ominous black and red flags (Will and John are in the foreground).

The main gate looked pretty defensible:

The wall 's prettiest area was where it passed over a stream:

We were there too late to participate in the dangerously-close-to-the-road-and-major-tourist -attractions archery, but we were in time to see this dog:

Suwon's historical museum had reconstructions of the tools used to build the walls:

There is a great bike path along the river through the center of town, though there are sections where only the penitent cyclist can pass, apparently:

In the shadow of the end of the extant wall there was a cluster of people selling vegetables, fruits, spices, etc. Such clusters are pretty much everywhere in Korea.

The main shopping and night life district seemed to be clustered around the old South gate.

Across the street there was a shop so small that the retailer barely fit inside. In America we would never think of using that tiny triangle of a space as a shop...

I'd love to live inside a fortress, and there are lots of towers overlooking parks that would be wonderful for hanging out, so if I come back to Korea I'll probably look for a job there. Also, Suwon is infinitely more centralized and alive than Daejeon. Daejeon always feels like a Sunday, whereas Suwon was vibrantly pulsing the whole time we were there (3-7pm). It's far enough away from Seoul to avoid most of the pollution, but it is still on the metro system, despite being 48km away.

We took the subway to Itaewon, the foreigner district in Seoul. After some searching we ate real tacos. It can be hard to find remotely authentic Mexican food in Korea. After a late dinner we forwent a ten minute subway ride in favor of a several hour walk to where we would be sleeping, which is what happens when people let me be in charge of travel plans (the cheapest way to Insadong is to walk). We went by way of Namsan (Nam mountain), home to N. Seoul tower and great views of the city. The buildings reflected off the Han river in a way that doubled them, making the river look like a chasm between masses of buildings in a Blade Runner-esque city.

At the base of the tower there were some nicely lit suspended sculptures:

Also millipedes (centipedes?). Maybe I shouldn't be so cavalier about sleeping outside...

In Insadong (our destination) we saw this stream with lanterns.

We stayed in a gimjjilbong (sauna) for about $6 for use of the various pools, saunas, and sleeping rooms. However, sleep was hard to come by in a room full of old men, one of whom snored to the point where no one else could sleep at all. It started out sounding like Chewbacca and then sounded more strained and almost panicked, like a dog having an asthma attack.

In the morning I wandered around the streets in the drizzle a bit, mostly looking at the Cheonggye Steam, which was decorated for the festival:

I met up with Lindsay and her mom and brother to see a prison museum. It had the original cells built by the Japanese during occupation, and also a series of displays with highly detailed and realistic life sized figures being tortured. The torture displays included waterboarding. Funny how everyone on the receiving end knows that it's torture...

It was raining when we left so I spent some time in the museums by one of the imperial palaces (there are six and I went to all of them. Get ready for way too many pictures[as if this post hadn't already hit that point]). The palaces all had special events for the Hi Seoul festival (just a celebration of the city), whose theme this year was palaces. More on that later. Koreans certainly know how to place their palaces so that they have epic backdrops:

I went to try to see the Prime Minister's residence, and though it isn't actually visible from public spaces, I had a nice dinner of mandu (dumplings) and a delightful snack from a street vendor of cinnamon and melted butter inside a disk of fried dough. I also saw this art piece that amused me:

And this questionable method of tearing down a building:

At this point I started to see busloads of riot police on every corner, just like the last time I was in Seoul. President Lee Myungbok has not made himself popular, and protests are frequent. I went to the Insadong stream for the parade for the Hi Seoul festival, and for a while I thought that the police might be a part of the parade since they seemed to be shooting for a one to one ratio with the civilians. I think that they are the closest thing I will see to legionaries; I saw one higher ranked officer pounding the shields of his subordinates to pump them up in a scene that looked straight out of Gladiator. The stream was still pretty but now crowded with police.
(Notice everyone's favorite insurance giant in the background)

The parade was surreal (apologies for my lack of photography skills. I clearly did not hold the camera still enough for the long exposure of low light shots, but you should get an idea of at least the colors and crowds). Well, the parade itself was only moderately interesting, with people in traditional costumes dancing and playing drums, and various cosplay folks (I think) on parade, but the interesting thing was the chaos. The parade itself went down the main street of the route, while protesters marched along a couple unused lanes of the street, sometimes going with the parade and at other times going against it. Periodically the riot police would move in formation to drive the protesters back. In the middle stood clusters of foreigners taking pictures and film, and thankfully all three groups of marching Koreans moved around us and they passed and interfered with each other's formations. Clearly we foreigners had trouble with the observer/participant boundary:
One of the protester's main complaints is that the government is starting to control the media, so I was amused to see this building along the parade route:

I later noticed this picture on the side of a police bus of how the police are trying to be portrayed, which was a bit dissonant with what I was watching.

I kept expecting things to get very violent given that the protesters were calling the president a dictator and the police were basically provoking them.

The police finally did arrest a couple hundred protesters once they started to interfere with the concert at the plaza where the parade ended. The concert was canceled and the plaza was blocked off. This strikes me as a poor method to counter the idea that the government is fascist: simply ignoring the protesters makes them seem less legitimate, especially since they were nonviolent.
As the plaza was being emptied I struck up a conversation with a trio of middle aged people (a South African, and American, and a Korean) who turned out to be Seventh Day Adventists, one of them a missionary. I had a surprisingly civil conversation with them concerning my atheism/nihilism over ice cream. Their beliefs were radically different: one thought that there was no anthropomorphic god or any heaven and hell, while another thought that she had personally seen angels and Jesus on her shoulder and demons cast out of her (the demons were put in when Scientologists brainwashed her. It was quite the story). I'm not sure why I kept talking with them when it was clear that they weren't susceptible to rational argument (they all didn't believe in evolution), but I didn't get at all angry or frustrated and I wasn't too rude, so that counts as progress for me, religious-tolerance-wise. When we finished speaking the plaza was pretty much empty, so I went back to the stream. I was thoroughly enjoying the lanterns and lights. I unfocused my eyes and treated it like Saturday night of Renn Fayre, which kept me (manically/madly) smiling for quite some time.

Below you can see a sign in the background for Magic: The Gathering (the card game), but when I looked at it through the lanterns and feeling the way I did at the time, the night did feel magical. (What the hell happened to the cynical Landon who would never think, much less say, something like that? Well, without objective truth, why can't there be magic? And I'm happier being less cynical and more open to spontaneous joy.) I decided to walk the length of the Cheonggye stream from where it started at the parade's start (it's now an artificial stream, though it was once natural, I think) to the Han river, 11.3 km away. After a few blocks the festival decorations ended, but there were plenty of permanently lit bridges and other semi-permanent art projects:(If you look closely you can see a crane standing on a pillar that once held a highway, silhouetted in the light of a building.)I reached the Han after a few hours walking.

And then of course I walked back. I took a quick nap behind some bushes on the stream's walkway before heading back to the starting point. The plaza at the font of the stream felt very different now that it was abandoned, though the emptiness gave a chance to investigate things more closely:

I spent a couple hours soaking my tired legs and napping in the gimjjilbong, then began my tour of the five palaces that I hadn't yet visited. The first palace (Gyeonghuigung) had a display of (plastic replicas of) foods that Joseon emperors ate. It was interesting to compare it to modern Korean food. Many dishes looked practically unchanged, including dumplings and kimchi, but also oddities like ginseng cake, complete with a full ginseng root on top of the icing. They also were giving out cardboard visors, which I completely now associate with ajima--older married women.The palace itself was what I now think of as a standard Korean palace. The architectural style, decorations, and even color scheme are all the same (yet for some reason I take pictures of all of them...).

There was a performance of a play about the royal family scheduled for later in the week, and I bet a lot of you theatre folks would love a performance space like this at your disposal:
Next to the palace was a free modern art museum. I thought that this building might be a temporary exhibition, but it was actually a reservations only display of Louis Vuitton purses. The actual art museum had a few interesting pieces:
I particularly liked this cityscape of printing press letters:

This piece reminds me of a etched print that Laurel made back during the '04-'05 school year and of which I helped her make eleven copies of the five plate design:

  I also liked these wire chairs covered in that foam that expands and hardens, which I'm sure I've made in a science class at some point, though the details elude me...

One the way to the next palace I passed the two plazas that were the end caps of the parade route. They were now repopulated and police free. Seoul Plaza had been decorated with cloth banners strung between the sky scrapers that were meant to look like a palace in the sky.

  At the stream (again) there were Korean teenagers with shirts that represented a year in the last 100 years, and they were all standing in the appropriate places in front of a poster of a timeline of important dates for the Korea in the last century. They were dancing to randomly mixed (mostly Western) songs from the various time periods. I was amused that they thought that all songs should be accompanied by the same hip hop dance, regardless of whether it was from the fifties, the eighties, or was actually a hip hop song.

  The stream also had a coin collection whose theme was one million won for one million wishes. I'm not sure what the money was for; it could have been a charity or just to try to recoup some of the money spent on the festival. Across from the Sky Palace of Seoul Plaza was Deoksugung, a palace that had been in use more recently than the others. From the 1890s until Japan conquered the country in 1910, Korea thrived and began to modernize under emperors ruling from here. They seemed to want to be neoclassical just like everyone else, judging by the buildings from that time period (as opposed to the restored ancient palace and the modern sky scrapers):

The palace had the remains of an ancient water clock. The emperors kept precise time both as a public service and as a symbol of their power.

Since the theme of the festival was palaces, there were lots of people reenacting parts from various time periods.

On the way to the next palace I passed Tapgol Park, where they know how to do lotus lanterns right:

There was a Go tournament outside Jongmyo,the next palace.

  There were reenacters here as well, performing a royal procession.
  The next palace was connected by a footpath over a busy street. It also had reenactments of a royal court in session.This palace (Changgyeonggung) also boasted an ancient Chinese pagoda, beautiful natural areas, and a truly ancient tree.It was only separated by the last palace by a wall, but there was no passage between the two, so I had to run back through it and Jongmyo and up through the streets to get to it.

  I missed the last English tour of the day, but the Korean tour was fine. Not understanding the guide made it so that I was willing to hang back and take pictures not filled with the dozens of tourists along for the tour. I was definitely glad that I saved this palace for last because I would have probably been rather bored if one of the others had been the sixth palace I'd visited. Lonely Planet is absolutely correct that Changdeokgung is by far the most interesting and beautiful of the palaces.

  Some of the architecture here was in the Chinese style, which only makes me want to visit China even more.

  The Lonely Planet guide is also correct to say that the most impressive part of the most impressive temple is the secret garden:

Though I also liked the buildings commissioned by a crown prince who wanted a nice place for scholarly pursuits:

Outside the palace there were folks from a nonprofit organization handing out free books in English. They wanted to promote Korean culture throughout the world, and I'll be happy to let anyone read my copy of "Chung Hyo Ye: Tales of filial devotion, loyalty, respect and benevolence from the history and folklore of Korea", since I happen to know that at least some of you are folklore enthusiasts.

After that I walked back to the train station and took the KTX home. Wow, I haven't gotten any better at writing shorter posts. Whew! So to review the Renn Fayre parallels, there was a huge party with a theme, a party that involved brightly colored lanterns, a token connection to medieval times despite really being thoroughly modern, a chaotic parade that ended with people in pads fighting, art structures, dance parties, and people enjoying simple things like shadow puppets and colored lights. Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch, but I'll take what I can get (Love Reed).