So last weekend we went on an excellent excursion with folks from our church to the DMZ.
It made for a very tiring weekend, since we had to leave Cheongju at 5:30am in order to get to Seoul in time for the tour, and I had decided that rather than deal with only getting a few hours of sleep, I might as well just stay awake and then sleep Saturday night. I think it worked.
Anyway, the DMZ tour itself was really cool. There's still a major section that I'd like to visit, but we've got tons more time for that.
Basically, there are two types of tours that you can take. One goes to Panmunjom, the re-unification village and Joint Security Area (the only place where both sides co-exist - in a way). The other, the one we were on, visits the Third Infiltration Tunnel.
Since the end of the Korean War (1950-53) the south has discovered 4 tunnels dug by the Northern army under the DMZ and into southern territory. The most recent one was found in the North-East part of the country -- in 1990.
Anyway, the third one was discovered in 1978, and is the one that got closest to Seoul. I think it reached within 45km. The tunnel was reportedly designed to move 30,000 troops per hour, although after having been inside a section of tunnel, I think that might be a bit of an overstatement. Either way, it's a pretty clear threat and a sobering idea to think that there may well be army folks tunneling under the DMZ at this very minute.
The other thing is that when the Korean War broke out, it only took the North 12 days to push all the way to Pusan before the South and UN forces combined to whomp them back almost all the way into China, before the North and China combined to whomp the South and UN all the way back to just about the exact place that they started, only with more living people on the peninsula and they were all three years younger.
The tunnel was neat. Crammed, but neat. After being discovered, the Northern army coated the walls of the tunnel in black coal dust-type-stuff to try and convince the South that it was really just a mining tunnel and not a military operation at all. The South wiped off the dust, revealing granite, and the rest kinda told itself.
Another neat bit of the tour was when we went up a mountain to a place called the Dora Observatory. It was (is?) a briefing room, and has the North-facing wall made entirely out of windows, ostensibly to allow the brief-ees to look at the jerks they're being told about by the brief-ers. It was really really hazy **side story here, I'll put it at the end** so it was quite hard to see much besides scenery, but outside they had those tourist binocular-things where you pop in a coin and get to see really far for about 3 minutes or something. I found some that said "for military use only" and then discovered that they were always on and didn't need any coins, and then discovered that they either didn't mean the sign that said "for military use only" or they weren't paying attention. Either that or I'm on a list now and have a very short time to live. I guess we'll find out soon enough.
Anyway, the binoculars were surprisingly effective at cutting through the fog that I was expecting to be seeing close-up, and they actually revealed a decent view of the stuff that you could actually find. I saw the North's flag on a huge steel flagpole, a propaganda village, and an industrial complex at work. It was all very neat, and eerie at the same time.
One thing the tour guide told us is that up to a few years ago, both sides actually had enormous sound systems set up to blast the other side with propaganda about how awesome it was to live there. Any visitors to the observatory would be bombarded by party tunes from the North, along with a narrator that continuously told you (in Korean) how wonderful life was up there and how much everyone was enjoying having so little food that they have to boil the bark off trees and eat that for breakfast lunch and dinner. I was a little sad that they stopped doing that, since it would've been really cool to hear.
Incidentally, the reason that there are no pictures accompanying this post is that for the vast majority of the tour, you're not allowed to take pictures at all. Most of the time, if they see you taking pictures you run a very good chance of being arrested and treated as a likely spy for the North. I can't imagine that'd make for an awesome Saturday, so I left my camera at home.
So those were the two main stops on the tour. At some point I think I'll be going on another one with some other foreign folks from here to visit Panmunjom and then my "Biggest Military Standoff in the World" tour will finally be complete.
Oh yeah, one more thing. On this particular tour, they spent a lot of time really emphasizing the efforts to re-unify Korea (or Corea -- I'll explain that later too). To me, it seems like a pipe dream as long as there's still a Kim dynasty loony running stuff up North, but whatever. I suppose it's good to have dreams. Point of interest -- it's now very weird for me to say "South Korea" referring to the country in which we now live. I just call it Korea. It's even weird for me to hear other people call it that. Here, they just call it Korea. It's not two countries to Koreans, it's one that's been divided for 50 years. Any maps of Korea that you see in schools will have the entire peninsula, and all the provinces and cities of the North labelled in exactly the same way that the cities in the South are. Even officially, the country's aren't called North and South Korea. "North Korea" is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (which is funny because the only thing that's accurate about that name is the word "Korea") and "South Korea" is simply the "Republic of Korea."
The last place that we went on the tour was a newly build train station that eventually is supposed to be a connecting station to catch passenger trains to the North. It's quite huge, so they're really thinking big. Anyway, they had a couple passport stamps specifically for that place, so my passport has those in it now.
**side story ahead**
I found out why it was so hazy. Apparently every spring for a couple weeks the Gobi desert spends most of its time being battered by winds that kick up a whole crap-load of yellow sand/dust and carry it over the Yellow Sea and dump it on to Korea. This is completely normal for Koreans. To the point where Betty actually asked us, "You don't get yellow dust in the springtime in Canada?"
This weekend (it's Saturday today) we're playing at Pearl Jam for a birthday party, and next week there's another show in Seoul. Updates and information to follow. I'll put up the posters for the Seoul show too.
Later all!
Oh yeah, the Korea/Corea thing. Well you see kids, back in the day, Korea was spelled with a "C". At least, the western name for it was. The Koreans call their country 한국 which is fine cause it's their country and they can call it what they want. It reads Han Gook, which I think is the origin-point of "gook" as a racial slur against orientals (which is not a racial slur at all here, no matter what anyone tells you). Anyway, back to the story. Around the turn of the 20th century, Japan went on another conquering binge and took over Corea. Over the course of their near-50-year occupation, it occured to the Japanese that it was slanderous and horrifying to have a colonized state with a name that supercedes their alphabetically, so they renamed it with a "K" so that in an alphabetical list, Korea would be below Japan.
I swear I'm not making this up. I've got a shirt that I bought at Pearl Jam, and the owner always spells it Corea on everything -- business cards, shirts, everything.
Okay that's that. On with my Saturday!