This past weekend a group of us from Busan ventured up to Seoul for the weekend! We left right after work on the KTX (super fast train) for our 3 hr ride. While we were sitting in our family seats (very special) we had the surprise of seeing a Korean mother make her two-year-old son pee in a water bottle right behind us. KOREANS ARE SO ODD! Once we got to Seoul we were in search of a “love motel”. These are super cheap motels and are supposed to be used for couples/lovers/hook-ups to do their business…Anyways! We found one, which was super gross, but it was late. Molly, myself, and David toughed it out and got two rooms there for a couple hours of sleep. The others went on a mission to find a ball’n place near the USO/tour location.
I’m pretty sure I had maybe an hour of sleep that whole night because we didn’t get to bed till 2:30am, the room was flippen cold and disgusting, the pillows were as hard as rocks, and we had to be up at 5:30am to find where we had to meet the tour- USO army base. We jumped in a taxi and the language barrier kicked in. It was pretty stressful cause we had no idea where we were going and the taxi driver didn’t either…We got on the phone with a translator and got things figured out. Turns out we were going completely the opposite way. It was supposed to be a 5 minute taxi ride but it was about 25 minutes and we had to be at the USO for 6:45am. We got there finally, signed in, and jumped on the bus for a hour and a half bus ride up to the DMZ. Our tour guide was so awkward which made the tour info a little annoying to hear but we got used to it. I liked the bus ride up because I got to see more of the country North of Seoul. Once we arrived to the DMZ we got hooked up with a USA army tour guide. He took us around to all the sites and informed us on the importance of each place. We were his second tour and boy was he nervous. He managed to throw out “that’s gay”, “oh fuck”, and “my bad” due to his nervousness. OH and as Molly said, “He just gave us Korean history for dummies”. Hilarious. We were able to go into the boardrooms where North and South Korea meet and talk. This was the JSA. We were able to physically stand in North Korea there, which was super cool! We took a bunch of pictures and the South Korean soldiers in the room were quite intimidating. After the boardroom we stood at the House of Freedom and stared at North Korea’s “House of Freedom” which stands taller than South Korea’s intentionally. It was eerie looking at that solider just standing there staring back at us occasionally pulling up his binoculars to look closer at us.
In our single filed lines we walked back to us bus and went to a look out to see Propaganda Village. This village was built to mimic South Korea’s and no one actually lives in the North Korea one! Very weird. They was also a flag tour built initially in South Korea and then North Korea built one exactly the same but taller then South Korea made theirs taller then North Korea retaliated and one upped South Korea, and so on. Finally, South Korea quit the silly game and let North Korea have the taller flag tower. It is now the tallest flag tower in the world and the flag weighs over 600lbs!
From here we had lunch, went to a souvenir shop, and went to another look out where we could see North Korea better. There was a line painted on the ground showing where you could and where you couldn’t take pictures. If you took pictures where you could the soldiers would either take or make you delete you pictures. Kind of intense! At this look out we saw lots of hawks and eagles soaring around. It made the experience even more eerie. For a second I was convinced they were fake but they were definitely real. After looking out into North Korea we were bussed down to the third underground tunnel that was discovered which the North Koreans built into South Korea. There have been 7 tunnels discovered and the latest one in 1990. The tunnel walk was about 500m underground and we weren’t aloud to take pictures down in it. It was pretty cool being that fair underground and to think that it was used by soldiers back in the day to get into each other’s countries. To end our tour we were blessed with a weird-ass video about the history between South and North Korea. There was definitely propaganda at its best there. They were trying to convince us that all was well between the two countries. SERIOUSLY?! But anyways the tour was awesome! Definitely a great experience. Oh and rumor has it…Kim Jon-IL had a stroke and is dead…ಹ
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