The West Commences: Tuesday, September 30, 2014

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.