SEOUL CITY VOLUME 1: THE DMZ
Apr. 11th, 2010 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogSo I went to Seoul for four days. I will file my report now in five installments (because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover here and studies show if an LJ post can’t be read in 45 seconds, people will just skip over it).
Let’s start with the obvious hot topic: the Demilitarized Zone. I was there. I saw it.
I can’t tell you what things I expected to see at the DMZ. An amusement park with a ride called the Super Viking was not one of them.
Anyway, the amusement park was closed, so it didn’t distract all that much from the general gravitas that you expect from a No Man’s Land splitting a country in half. (And I saw East Germany back when there was one, so I can say that.)
We saw much, most of which we weren’t allowed to take photos of (to include, sadly, the highway sign saying “Pyeongyang: 203 miles” – one of many things I had never seen before and may never see again).
Consequently, what you see in the Photobukkits is mainly the Bridge of Freedom, where POWs were handed over from North to South in 1953 (and where the first transborder railway link was tested in 2007) and the location of The 3rd Tunnel Of Aggression (one of four tunnels running under the DMZ that NK evidently dug in hopes of launching a secret ground attack on Seoul – the SK govt suspects there are at least ten more they haven’t found yet).
The tunnel was physically grueling in ways I didn’t expect – a 350-meter walk down a sharp slope then another 435 meters inside the tunnel which you can walk comfortably as long as you are under five feet tall. On the plus side, the museum came with a multiscreen propaganda film explaining loudly about those insidious North Koreans.
Overall, it was an interesting experience. It really gives you an idea of the tensions between the North and South, why they exist and why it could all go pear-shaped in a heartbeat if Kim Jong-Il or his successor were to finally just say, “Oh fuck it, let’s roll.”
PRODUCTION NOTE: That last picture there about the DMZ chocolate? We tried it. It’s chocolate-covered soybeans with a candy shell. Not too bad.
Next: the food!
The demilitarized zone is for loading and unloading only,
This is dF
Let’s start with the obvious hot topic: the Demilitarized Zone. I was there. I saw it.
I can’t tell you what things I expected to see at the DMZ. An amusement park with a ride called the Super Viking was not one of them.
Anyway, the amusement park was closed, so it didn’t distract all that much from the general gravitas that you expect from a No Man’s Land splitting a country in half. (And I saw East Germany back when there was one, so I can say that.)
We saw much, most of which we weren’t allowed to take photos of (to include, sadly, the highway sign saying “Pyeongyang: 203 miles” – one of many things I had never seen before and may never see again).
Consequently, what you see in the Photobukkits is mainly the Bridge of Freedom, where POWs were handed over from North to South in 1953 (and where the first transborder railway link was tested in 2007) and the location of The 3rd Tunnel Of Aggression (one of four tunnels running under the DMZ that NK evidently dug in hopes of launching a secret ground attack on Seoul – the SK govt suspects there are at least ten more they haven’t found yet).
The tunnel was physically grueling in ways I didn’t expect – a 350-meter walk down a sharp slope then another 435 meters inside the tunnel which you can walk comfortably as long as you are under five feet tall. On the plus side, the museum came with a multiscreen propaganda film explaining loudly about those insidious North Koreans.
Overall, it was an interesting experience. It really gives you an idea of the tensions between the North and South, why they exist and why it could all go pear-shaped in a heartbeat if Kim Jong-Il or his successor were to finally just say, “Oh fuck it, let’s roll.”
PRODUCTION NOTE: That last picture there about the DMZ chocolate? We tried it. It’s chocolate-covered soybeans with a candy shell. Not too bad.
Next: the food!
The demilitarized zone is for loading and unloading only,
This is dF
