This week was much fuller than I had anticipated it would
be. It’s the 2014 Incheon Asian
Games, and there are many things happening in connection with that. On Monday I went to Seoul Station on
the subway to see about the train to the DMZ that I had read about on
line. Once that was figured out, I
decided to walk around the area of Seoul Station. I was barely out of the new building when I was drawn to an
old one next door. It was the
central part of the original Seoul Station that was not destroyed in the Korean
War. It has been turned into a
cultural centre. At the moment the
entire place is devoted to an exhibition of the works of a Korean artist, Choi.
Jeong Hwa. I had never heard of him, but fortunately as I was looking at the
first room a woman came over and told me a bit about his art so that I was
aware of his working with the past and the present, stacking things in
interesting ways and turning found objects in to art. He sees beauty in almost everything and creates flowers in
the most inventive ways out of all sorts of ordinary household articles. I spent hours going from room to room.
On Tuesday I rode the bike to Central Park to watch the
women and men’s triathlon finals.
I spent most of the day going from one part of the route to another,
getting quite close to the athletes at times. What a grind that event is. This was an official Olympic course and even the swimming
portion was longer than I had thought it would be. I was mostly cheering for the team from the
Philippines. They did quite well
in the swimming and biking portions but fell behind in the final running
stage. The Japanese team that I
had watched training on the weekend won overall. The Chinese were next and then Korea.
Jay and I went to the DMZ on Saturday. I’ve wanted to go there since I first
came to Korea but haven’t been able to for various reasons until this
trip. I have to admit that the
entire excursion took almost 12 hours, most of which was spent on one kind of
transportation or another. First
we had to take the subway for about an hour and a half from Campus Town, where
Jay lives, to Seoul Station. Then we caught the train to Dorasan, the last stop
before North Korea. After being
shut down for about 7 years, this train was started up again in May of this
year. When I first saw it I
thought it must destined for a children’s park because its 3 cars are painted
white and covered in pastel drawings of plants and animals, but no, this is the
train that conveys you to the scene of so much tension between the two Koreas
since 1954. We were on it
for about an hour before we reached Imjingang, the last stop before
Dorasan. Here we were counted and
given 2 tags, which we had to wear around our necks for the rest of the
trip. From this station on, I
really felt as if we were on a school outing; we were in this colorful
conveyance and being counted innumerable times. We were counted as we got back on to continue to Dorasan. It wasn’t until we crossed a narrow
river that was lined on both sides with razor wire that the idea of visiting
the DMZ became a reality. There’s
something solemn about rolls of rusty wire on top of endless lines of tall
rusted fences. We finally
detrained at Dorasan and were counted some more, this time by bigger military
men in the official black and white South Korean uniforms. Jay and I ended up touring the Dorasan
(Hill 155) area on a bus with a convivial group of middle-aged Koreans who
continued munching on chestnuts and drinking the sweet North Korean wine they had
bought at the first kiosk they came to in Dorasan in spite of the fact that
they had been asked by the bus driver not to drink. They offered us some, we accepted and the driver gave up. He made an obvious show of wiping some
wine off the floor of the bus at one point, but that was it. We went to the top of the hill to
observe the DMZ through binoculars.
It’s a vast expanse of green and brown with what looks like a small
abandoned village and two flags waving in the distance, one for the North and
one for the South. It’s impressive
mostly for its silent, emptiness.
Then we watched a loud and rather propagandistic film about the Korean
War and the 4 tunnels that the North Koreans built in the decade or so between
the late 60s and the early 80s to take soldiers south to attack Seoul. It ended with an explanation of the
attempt presently being made by South Korea to preserve the environment in this
area which has had no people living in it for decades. Finally, we put on hard hats and
boarded an open train to descend into the third tunnel. It was an impressively steep
descent. When we reached the
tunnel dug by the North Koreans, we got off the train and walked along it, bent
over between the damp granite walls.
Memories of Charles Bronson’s panic when he finally had to escape
through the tunnel in the movie ‘The Great Escape’ came back to me. Being inside such a long, deep passage
for any length of time, let alone digging or rather blasting and removing rock
to make it is unthinkable to me.
Finally we were back on the warm, sunny surface and returned to our
pastel painted train to be left with the carefully orchestrated impression that
the South is bending all its efforts toward peace, unity and the preservation
of the unique ecosystem that is the DMZ.
The trip was well worth the long time spent on train, bus and
subway. The fact that the latter
is mostly deep underground did not escape me, but it’s so huge, well tiled, dry
and efficient that I soon ignored it.
Choi Jeong Hwa's bouquet of cleaning utensils in his exhibition at the old Seoul Station
One of the artist's statements
One of the corners in the biking segment of the men's triathlon at the Incheon Asian Games
The member of the Japanese team who won the men's triathlon
Jay inside the train to the DMZ, getting help filling out the forms. Note that as in all Korean conveyances the stewardesses are young, thin and impeccably dressed and coiffed.
Me with my tags at the place on the mountain where you could look out over the DMZ
The unity statue at the site of Tunnel 3
Min Hee, Jim Hee and their friend outside the apartment
