Day 58

We'll begin with St. Patrick's day. A celebration was held in Hyehwa (a part of Seoul) attended mostly by westerners. Oh how I don't miss loud drunk westerners. Still it was a good time, and they had free guinness as well as irish dancing.

I rarely get drunk.

This was last month, just moments before my very first haircut in Korea. I wanted to take a picture to give to future hair dressers should the haircut go horribly wrong:

My favorite restaurant, a buffet:

What's that? A cotton candy machine mounted to a motorcycle? What a brilliant invention. The guy literally drives around town like the ice cream man and makes cotton candy on the spot:

My regular hiking path, near the apartment. This is part of the lowest section near a large temple.

I've seen more hilarious signs than I can count, and just recently I've decided to start taking photographs of them as often as possible. My hope is to make an album solely of funny signs for my kids to see someday.

Two awards for this bathroom. "Seoul Best Toilet 2003" is pretty huge considering this is a city of 20 million people. It was nice inside... lots of art and air freshener.

Buddha's birthday was yesterday. People make wishes and tie them to this railing downtown by a river.

I saw these two lovely people in a park eating some KFC and I just had to take a picture. They happily obliged!

Ok it was an ad at a subway station. Still funny.

How many electronic buttons does your toilet have? None? Well mine has none too, but the toilets at the Lotte Hotel (very fancy place) have, count 'em, 13.

Yum. In Korea food is usually titled as literally as possible, so the english translations are either very boring or very funny. Usually food is advertized by weight as well, and restaurants are simply named after what main thing they sell. Many, many bars are just called "Hof Soju" (hof = beer). So all the advertizing tricks we have in the west with the 99 cents attached to everything as well as many descriptive adjectives on menus, aren't here in Korea just yet. Also, no sales tax here. Canadians who've never travelled to a no-sales-tax country don't know what they're missing. Paying the actual price on the menu or sign feels so much more rational.

And here we go with some photos from my trip up north to the DMZ. We went to the northernmost train station connected to NK, then a DMZ observatory up on a hill, and finally to the "3rd infiltration tunnel," a tunnel under the DMZ built by the NK army in the early 70's as an attempt to launch a sneak attack on SK.

The train tracks, however, have no train. The whole thing was built in the hopes that NK would let trains connect the south directly to China and the rest of Asia, but no luck so far. There are literally no trains anywhere on the track, and the station is a ghost town upkept perfectly and frequented by small numbers of international tourists.

At the observatory we had a great view across the DMZ and into the north. The telescopes gave us a clear view of a NK town across the boundary, and I even picked out some people walking around doing their daily business. There was a "camera line" though, behind the telescopes, so that nobody could take pictures of the military base right below and in front of the observatory, so I couldn't get much of a photo. Being tall helped a bit:

A butterfly.

The monorail down into the tunnel: No cameras were allowed, which was a real shame because the place was really cool. In 1972 the SK army caught North Korean tunnelers red-handed under the DMZ, dynamiting a tunnel nearly 100m under the ground clear across the border. The diggers, in a last ditch effort, spraypainted the walls black and tried to pretend they were mere coal miners. No joke. That was the best plan they came up with. Considering that the whole geographical area is granite with no coal for hundreds of miles, and the obviousness of the spraypaint, the story did not hold up.

Anyway, the SK army made their own tunnel that intercepted the Nortk Korean operation, and now the whole thing is a tourist site (ar at least the SK half of it.) We took a monorail into the earth 100m down and walked the length of the 3rd infiltration tunnel, about 400m. It was very small... a circular thing with a diameter of 6 feet. I had to duck the whole way, and only 2 people could walk side-by-side. At the end was a very thick wall separating the South half from the North half. It was dark, dank, and very wet (groundwater) with lichens growing all over the walls. There were a good number of tourists, but it didn't feel at all like a place tourists should be. And I was surprised in hindsight by the total lack of claustrophobia warnings before we went in.. some people were a bit shaken up. Here we are at the entrance:

A large bell. The tour guide told some story about good luck and wishes that I can't remember.

On the 'freedom' bridge connecting the Koreas across the western Imjin River, which is barricaded at each entrance, there were a bunch of messages hung up on the fence.

Looking across the river to NK, you can see the barbed wire and outposts in the foreground.

A love motel near our lunch stop. Some love motels are discreet, and others less so. My girlfriend wondered why I was taking a picture, so I taught her just a little bit of greek out of my old GRS and Plato classes.