Visitor and DMZ Adventures!

My beautiful mother recently came over for a little visit.  She was our first official visitor and we loved getting to show her where we live and some of the things we love about South Korea!


She was a very good sport and was up for trying pretty much any kind of Korean food we threw at her!  As a result, she was getting pretty good with a set of chopsticks by the time she headed back home! :)

We spent one day of her visit on a trip to the DMZ (the Demilitarized Zone), which is basically a buffer zone of the hostile border between North and South Korea.  We got to tour several museums about the history of the conflict, one of the several tunnels coming from the North (assumed for a potential military invasion) that South Korea has discovered in the past few years, and see the completed train station/track towards the North in hopes that the two sides will someday reconcile.


This picture is in the JSA (Joint Security Area) where negotiations between the two countries are held.  Some buildings in the area are controlled by South Korea and some are controlled by North Korea.  This blue building is under South Korean control and the soldier next to it (they maintain a posture of half behind the building) is a South  Korean solider.  The gray building is controlled by North Korea.  If you look carefully you can see a North Korean soldier in front of the door to the left!  Basically they just stare each other down all day I think. . .

Here is Mom inside the blue building next to a South Korean soldier.  Technically she is standing on the side of the building that is considered North Korean territory, yikes!

Part of the original amnesty agreement between the two sides is that they could both build "peace" villages on each of their respective sides of the DMZ.  South Korea's is a small farming village made up primarily of people who are descendant of areas most affected by the countries civil war.  The residents are treated with special respect by the South Korean government.  

The buildings over Hubs left shoulder are part of the North Korean village.  

Below there is another picture zoomed in a little bit.  Looks like a pretty impressive town for impoverished North Korean right?  Well it would be. . if it was real!!  Basically this is a movie set town.  No one actually lives here, with the exception of a few caretakers.   Based off carefully observation over the years, South Korea and the US has discovered that that most of the buildings don't even have floors, rooms, or glass in the windows.  The lights are turned on at certain times and sometimes the caretakers are seen sweeping the streets  to project the appearance that it is occupied. There are also loud speakers throughout the town that broadcast loud propaganda messages encouraging the members of the South Korean peace village to defect to the North.  Oh, and that giant tower is a giant flagpole.  The North built it after South Korea put up a similar flagpole in their peace village.  The North Koreans made sure to build theirs 200 feet taller though so at the time they had the tallest flagpole in the world.  So silly. :)  I don't know about you but I'd probably have saved the money and put it towards other things. . like maybe food for their starving people. . .?

Unfortunatly monsoon season started about halfway through Mom's trip so some of the other fun adventures we had planned for her didn't happen. :(  (Guess she'll have to come back!).   However thanks to the Korean's great take on indoor markets, the weather didn't keep us from shopping!  I took her to one of my favorite districts in Seoul.  It is simply impossible for a picture to capture the incredible amount of STUFF for sale.  The below picture is one small hallway on the "shoe floor" of one of the market buildings.  

Each floor specializes in certain merchandise (a floor for mens clothes, floor for purses and jewelry, floor for casual woman's clothes, a floor for dressy woman's clothes, a floor for shoes, etc).  The floors have upwards of 15 hallways like this and each building has between 8-10 floors.  And there are LOTS of buildings.  When combined with the fact that the vendors speak minimal English, everything is bought through bargining, and there are no dressing rooms (if you want to try something on you do it behind a curtain or something in the open underneath a big cloth skirt) its basically the most fun/exhausting shopping experience ever!  Thanks for being a great shopping/adventure buddy Mom!