DMZ, Part II

We also got to look out the bus window at the famed "Bridge of No Return" which POWs from both sides crossed during postwar repatriation. Seeing the actual bridge, both in picture and in person, isn't as exciting as you want it to be, or anything close to its depiction in Die Another Day.

At another stop on the tour we got to see, from afar, the closest villages on either side of the DMZ, both fairly ridiculous in their own right, set up for the sole purpose of creating a tantalizing image of what greatness lies across the divide. A pissing contest of sorts, this led to the creation of the world's tallest flagpole (525 ft.) and heaviest flag (600 lbs.) in the North Korean village, and years of loudspeakers blasting praise for the Dear Leader from one side and pop music from the other. Both of these villages have actual Korean names, (and both ending in "-dong", teehee!), but the American military has nicknames for them; the North Korean village is called "Propaganda Village", so that you understand it's merely a propaganda campaign, and the South Korean village is called "Freedom Village", so that you understand it's a well-meaning propaganda campaign. Inhabitants of Freedom Village are paid handsomely for their residence, though they are subject to a nightly 11pm curfew and other restrictions. According to our guide, Propaganda Village contains no residents whatsoever, other than people employed to turn lights on and off.

The strangest part of this tour came near the end when we watched a fifteen minute video summarizing the history of the DMZ. It attempted to depict the DMZ as an inspirational symbol of peace in the world, emphasizing, among other things, the variety of wildlife inhabiting it. The video began and ended with staged footage of a Korean girl first crying, then happily playing, near a dividing fence, and contained an animated sequence with a butterfly fluttering about, making park benches appear and dividing markers disappear. Having seen the military-manned and otherwise barren wasteland containing no wildlife and little more than still-active landmines less than an hour earlier with our own eyes, the people sitting near me during the video were just as "WTF" baffled by this as I was. I wanted to cry Orwell! Orwell! but even that didn't seem to fit, since the combination of timing and ridiculousness of the material left no chance of its intended audience taking it seriously.

As far as I can tell, the video had something to do with South Korea's intentions to forge closer ties with their Northern counterparts, as the President had just returned from a summit with Kim Jong Il in which they initiated a new peace declaration the day before I went on this tour. South Korean sentiment over this new friendliness toward the North is generally mixed. These guys, however, demonstrating outside a government building in Seoul, were decidedly against it:

Update!
This post was supposed to conclude with video footage of some really angry protesters I saw in Seoul the day before I went on this tour, but after several attempts I've given up trying to upload it. My apologies to any readers that actually made it this far. (Mom?)

Update!
Here's the much anticipated video. Upon rewatching it, I guess they're actually rather orderly protesters.

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.

Woodpiles

This summer I spent several weeks in rural/mountainous/forested Austria and Germany and I was really struck by the woodpiles, both the number and their variety of style and structure. My parents have two woodpiles, one of geometrically cut lumber, inside the garage, and one of logs with bark still on, in the yard along an exterior wall, braced at both ends by tall metal fence posts and wires. (They have a wood-burning stove they use to create a comfy living room atmosphere and drastically reduce winter heating bills.) I'd like to see my father take a cue from the technique employed in many of the woodpiles I saw (and the first several shown here), using cut logs laid perpendicularly so as to eliminate the need for end braces.

Inevitable Robot Takeover

Today construction workers, tomorrow time-traveling government operatives.



Oh, it's a friendly robot ... this time.