Please drop me off at 38th and N. Korea

This humble raconteur has let another week go by without updating you, the loyal reader, to his whereabouts and otherabouts that have been going on here in east Asia; this of course is all you, the loyal reader, have been thinking about since you remembered that the author had a blog and you should probably check it but then when you finally got there, there was nothing to see. The author offers an apology and will not waste more text in third person as so that he might get to the meat of the entry, known in literary terms, as the “body.”

This body will be filled with tales of excitement, intrigue, and awesomeness and will no doubt be knee deep in extraneous commas, to boot. To start things off, I went to the 38^th parallel last weekend! I went with two coworkers and met up with David and Abby and some friends of theirs for the tour. While the tour is entirely worth doing and one of the most bizarre and surreal places I have even been, it was just plain odd to be frank.

For one, Koreans aren’t allowed to go on any tours that get all that close to the actual middle of the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which just in case you haven’t kept up with major world events from the 20^th century or watched an episode of MASH on the Hallmark channel with my mom… then you should know that the 38^th parallel is where the Korean war came to a ceasefire and a truce is held between UN forces and North Korea. Set against this backdrop tours of westerners and Chinese come through every weekend and take photos. Photos have been uploaded and they have promised to try and can’t quite do it justice.

We were led around very quickly and the whole thing was only a couple of hours long. We got to go to a stone’s throw of the actual line between the divided nation, though I wouldn’t recommend throwing any stones near the line. There we saw UN soldiers half-hiding behind UN buildings staring down one or two North Korean soldiers who would come and look at us through binoculars and then hide behind pillars on their building, repeat. After this we were led to a see a video with the most stereotypical, shop class safety video of a narrator telling us of the importance of the DMZ, least of which is the fact that it is a default nature preserve (filled with landmines…).

All in all I don’t know what to really say. It was filled with soldiers and tourists who outnumbered the combined armies of North and South Korea and I thought a lot about Alan Alda, whose show ran for longer than the war it portrays. It was a weird contrast from the UN Memorial Cemetery in Busan. There we surrounded by the ghosts of the past and in the DMZ we were surrounded by a weird commercialization of a conflict over 50 years old now defended by the grandchildren of that war. Besides the CCTV which is everywhere in South Korea and watching your every move, you couldn’t ask for a more perfect, living example of Orwell’s 1984 in which the 3 nations of Earth are constantly at war with each other.

More updates with a more cheery tone above to break this up and for gettin’ ya down, up top.