The Skull Bong: Seoul II: DMZ or not to DMZ

Frosty mornin'

I heard somewhere that the tour of the DMZ was cool, so I booked a ticket on a tour that left at 730am from my hostel. A mid 30s dude named Han picked me up and we drove around in his Hyundai van grabbing the other tourists: 3 Filipinas and 2 German gals. We drove to the DMZ parking lot an hour outside of town where we got out and took a bunch of photos of stuff. There was a mighty rime across the land that beautified the landscape, true winterness! Busloads of Korean and Chinese tourists with a few westerners sprinkled in scurried about taking pics for the folks back home. My hopes were high that there'd be a bunch of cool, cold war-type biz waiting for me later in the tour.

BTW, I'm typing this in a PCbang which is a room full of super dank computers with gigantic monitors and loads of college aged kids hacking away in some WoW-type MMORPG. A room full-o zombies. For $2 per hour, I can see why. Cheaper than a hookah.

DSIII at the DMZ

Anyway, we got on a tour bus that took us to the 3rd tunnel that the S. Koreans discovered that the N. Koreans were digging to launch a snack attack on Seoul. We were ushered into a theater and give English-translating headsets while a propaganda piece played detailing the uncoolness of the Korean war. The narrator sounded like a Korean with a perfect American accent, carried away with his task, sort of like a narrator on some FOX show about animals revenge-killing people or something. I thought the South Koreans would be more impartial/tasteful about the whole thing, but as I was about to find out, the S. Korean tourism industry in the DMZ is not about good taste.

tasteless kitsch

just in case your pants are falling down at the DMZ and you need a new "velt"

a commemorative towel @ the DMZ

DMZ Dinner, the imperialist Yankees are alive and well

It's Brooklyn! Or, wait, it's the DMZ.

Then, after leaving our electronic devices in lockers, we grabbed hard hats off shelves and headed down a 350M 11 degree descent, passing lots of folks who were on their way up. At the bottom, it became apparent why we had hard hats. A long and low tunner extended into the distance. I hoped there would be something cool at the end, especially since hunching over and trying not to hit my dome on the dank rock roof for a couple hundred meters was proving fairly uncomfortable. I guess all that starvation saved the N. Koreans lots of work in not removing many tons of rock that the taller, better fed S. Koreans would have had to remove to avoid noggin smashing (were they to invade the North via tunnels, which they'd never do cuz that's a silly way to invade a country. That, and they have American backing in all things military. At the end of the tunnel there was a rusty metal hatch and some red string lights. Talk about anti-climactic! I was kinda pissed that no one on the way up warned me that this part of the tour was a waste of time. Of course on the way back up I warned no one, since it was totally possible this was gonna be the time of their life.

bathroom at unused train station in DMZ

I always find it amusing that the N. and S. Koreans dream of reunification under the pretenses that the North stops being a fascist dictatorship and the South stops being a capitalist American stooge. How can North Korea come to terms with there being a Popeye's Chicken at the DMZ??? I have a hard time with that and I'm not even a fascist dicta... Anyway, both will never happen without considerable outside influence/force. Think of all the t-shirts that could have gone unprinted if the South just let things be.

In the information center there was an area that had a bunch of guns on display and a model of the Panmunjon. A tour guide was giving her spiel to a small group of Americans and one of them, a 70ish year old man remarked that the buildings looked the same as when he had been there during the war. I kept thinking about the Utah Phillips interview with Amy Goodman that I've listened to 30 or so times in which he talks about his time in Korea and his memory of his time there being, mainly, of children crying. That, and why he couldn't swim in the Imjin river. Listen to it. It's great, especially for us grandfatherless folk.

Then we had an opportunity to check out the gift shop which was full of totally tasteless kitschy garbage commemorating the DMZ and assorted snack foods, some with amusing names. Then we were dragged to a train station that was built just in case N. Korea quits its bullshit and everyone plays nice. But for now, it's a train station that you can take a train to... and then go right back from whence ye came. It's staffed with MPs who don't carry guns.

Finally we got back on the bus and went back to the main parking lot where we got into Han's van, paid him $44 and drove back to Seoul. He offered to take us to a ginseng factory or a duty free cosmetics store. The group decided on the Ginseng factory and upon our return to the part of Seoul where lay the ginseng factory, I departed from the group and went off in search of some kimchi soup.

Then I walked around for a while and got lost, wandering through outdoor markets n stuff where I snapped some photos of more dead animals before finding a metro station that I took to Ehwa Womans University where I heard they had a good (and free) art and pottery museum. From the metro I walked downhill towards the campus and was greeted by a stream of young women as I walked past cosmetic store after boutique after cosmetic store. Makes sense, I guess, but the contrast between how real Korean young women look and how the idealized brown-haired western-featured-through-plastic-surgery Korean models look was unnerving. It was strange to see an invading foreign look portrayed as the ideal. In the US, I'm used to seeing the dominant domestic culture dictate the beauty standards. I wonder if it matters if the idealized beauty being ethnically unobtainable in Korea is any different in practice than it being unobtainable in the US for white American women due solely to the idealized beauty being unreasonable (rather than impossible). I'm sure pretty much anyone more articulate than I would have had something interesting to say on the matter.

get your hair did

ink painting is the new black

Finally I made it to the Womans (not Womens) university museum that was ok, with the exception of an amazing collection of contemporary works that included this doozy. Mind blowd.

Interesting nuggets:
There are almost ZERO garbage cans anywhere I've been. I think it's because trash collection is super expensive. Or something.
In some areas there are tons of bikes, but almost no one riding them.
There are Coca Cola vending machines, but no Cokes in them, just fruit sodas and coffee drinks. I haven't seen any diet soda yet.

Put that in your never-again-to-be-unified Skull Bong and smoke it.