Survived North Korea

It's been a looooong day! Up at 4:30a.m. and on the subway by 5:30; destination - USO Camp Kim to begin our tour of the Korean D.M.Z.. With a bus load of foreigners, we proceeded to the DMZ with our korean tour guide - John. We hit up three major places: Panmunjeom, Third Tunnel, and an Observation point, and a few stops in between.

At Panmunjeom, we went into the MAC building which has one half in each country - so we crossed the room and were in North Korea; unfortunately they don't stamp your passport. This room is where all negotiations take place and it's been in a few movies - it's quite famous. The tour guide told us an amusing story: when President George W. Bush visited the area, he was in the building and several North Koreans entered, took the silk American flag off the wall and polishd their shoes with it. The flags were replaced with hard plastic flags in a frame.

The Propaganda Village is called so because it used to broadcast propaganda over loud speakers towards South Korea, hoping to get some people to defect - yeah right! The village is actually empty, there isn't even glass over the windows. Some caretakers turn on and off lights to make it seem populated. In the middle of the 'village' there's a huge flag pole with the largest flag in the world on top. The flag itself is 31 meters long and weighs 600lbs dry! There wasn't enough wind to pick it up. Both sides have a flag pole; at one time, the South Koreans built a large pole, 100 meters tall, and North Korea responded with a 160 meter one. Talk about compensating...a similar battle of size occurred with this building (not the blue building). It used to be two stories tall until South Korea built a large reunion building opposite it. Unfortunately, the building has never been used to reunite split families since the North fears defection.

The Third Tunnel was really neat, but we weren't allowed to take pictures :( It's a good haul back up the tunnel; here's Mary, exhausted at the top. Actually, we weren't allowed to take pictures in many places for supposed security reasons. This photo line at the Observatory shows how strict they were and even when behind the line, you couldn't take pictures to the south.

The whole tour was definitely worth the $40. We got back to Seoul at 3:30p.m. Maybe we'll go back when things get greener.

View a slide show of the photos.