DMZ, Part I

North Korean guards at the Panmun-Gak Pavilion

I recently spent five days in Korea, for the purpose of obtaining my work visa at the Japanese consulate in Seoul (it's complicated). While I was there I went on a group tour to the DMZ.

For those unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar, the DMZ - which stands for the misnomer "Demilitarized Zone" - is a 4km x 240km area dividing North and South Korea. The area was more or less entirely shared between North and South until the tragic, yet awesomely-named "Axe Murder Incident" of 1976, during which two American soldiers were killed with their own axes, by North Korean soldiers, while attempting to chop down a poplar tree that was impeding vision between guardposts. After the Americans later successfully felled the tree during "Operation Paul Bunyan" the entire DMZ was divided down the center to prevent further, um, mingling between North and South. This dotted line bisects several buildings, sometimes used for diplomatic purposes, which we visited as part of the tour. So, while wandering past the midpoint of this building, I was arguably "in" North Korea. Here's a view from inside.

The encased flags are from countries that fought or aided the South Korean effort in the Korean War. The case now contains flags made of plastic, not fabric, because of an incident in 2001 when, at the exact moment President Bush was meeting with South Korean diplomats elsewhere in the world, two North Korean soldiers entered this building and wiped their feet and blew their noses with the South Korean and American flags, respectively.

I don't have any such interesting explanation for the matching Hawaiian shirts sported by my corpulent compatriots. Your guess is as good as mine.