On Friday morning last week I boarded a train in Takaoka City, Toyama and headed off to Kansai Airport. I was bound for Seoul, Korea.
I met up with my friends who studied abroad at my high school in New Zealand and we headed off for a weekend of shopping, sightseeing, learning and eating.
Korea is a place I have wanted to go to for quite some time. It’s a place that not many New Zealanders seem to want to go to. That’s understandable, I mean why go to Korea when you can go to Thailand or Malaysia for much cheaper. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about going there for quite a while because it’s the middle ground between Japan and China. Clean, safe and capitalist whilst having awesome markets and amazing food. The language even sounds like it’s across between Japanese and Chinese strangely enough. I had no fears cruising around Seoul with my Japanese friends and felt completely safe at all times even with my big purple handbag and brownish blonde hair.
One of the reasons I wanted to go to South Korea was that it is, in fact, still engaged in one of the last relics of the ideological war between the communist world and the capitalist world. I took a tour to the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) in part because I am my father’s daughter and in part because I felt it was a way to gain a deeper understanding of a war that I briefly and superficially studied in my Asia-Pacific Politics class during my Bachelor of Arts. I can tell you that I learned at lot in the 6 hours we spent on a bus with ‘the handsome Mr Kim’ from The Service Club. 78,000 won well spent! The Handsome Mr Kim told us about how the South Koreans feel towards the North Koreans and was incredibly knowledgeable about the DMZ and the Republic of Korea military, perhaps because he is a South Korean man and so had to do compulsory military service.
We took the Panmunjom tour to the Joint Security Area, a tour that South Korean citizens have to jump through hoops for months to be able to do and even then might not be allowed to do it. It takes you as close to the DPRK as a civilian can get without having to jump through hoops for months and then have to pay minders and whatnot. It was an amazing tour worth a blog entry of its own but I want people to do it if they go to South Korea so I’m not going to rave about it anymore. Instead I am going to point you in the direction of http://www.tourdmz.com . If you have the guts I would definitely recommend doing a tour to Panmunjom. I’ve reflected a lot since coming home and I feel like it brings a thing or two home if you know what I mean.
We stayed, shopped and ate in Myeongdong. It’s a really vibrant shopping district with awesome nightlife. We also visited Gyeongbok-gung Palace, Heounginji-mun Gate, Insadong shopping area and Dondaemon shopping area. I really enjoyed my trip to Korea. Things are really cheap, the food is really spicy but amazingly flavourful. The whole experience was amazing. The place is so colourful and bright. The people are remarkably kind, even if they are almost always trying to sell you something.
I am going to write another entry about my reflections on the DMZ tour and the reaction of some friends and “family” to my trip.
Don’t be misled though, I didn’t just go there for the DMZ, I went there for some culture too you know. Words cannot really describe the experience I had in my less than 3 days in Korea though. I really wish I was better at describing my intense/whirlwind trips with words.
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