Harvard Reunion in Korea

Monday, January 22, 2007
I switched planes in Taiwan, and boarded my flight to Korea with ease. As I disembarked, guess who I discovered sitting a few rows in front of me? JANNIE TSUEI. That’s right. The world is so small! She had come back home to Taiwan because of a family illness and was flying through the Seoul airport back to Boston, where she is currently living. We had a nice chat before immigration and bid each other farewell. I read the now-valuable copy of Opal Mehta that I had purchased in Lamma.

Corey had given me excellent directions from the Inchon airport into Seoul, and he picked me up at the City Air Terminal in COEX (the largest underground mall in Asia!). I napped at his studio a few blocks away until he finished teaching at Princeton Review at 10 p.m. I did a load of laundry. We went out for fried chicken and beer (when you order drinks in Korea you generally order food, too), and then Corey introduced me to rice wine, which made us both quite giggly.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007
This was a day to which I had been looking forward my entire trip! I met Angela Soeun Kim at COEX, and after getting over how weird it was to see each other on the other side of the world from Harvard, we picked up some coffee (actually, Angela had a green tea latte) at Café Pascucci. We took the metro to Ewha Women’s University where Ang studies with her fellowship (though her program is co-ed) and, after a fabulous lunch of bibimbap (my favorite Korean dish is a mixture of rice and vegetables and meat with an egg on top served in a hot stone bowl that you then mix together), I got a grand tour of Ee-dey, as they call it (I am spelling it phonetically).

On the Ewha campus, I saw Angela’s classroom and her dorm (which has holes a lot like Mather’s!) and the cathedral and the cafeteria. We took a ton of funny pictures. We walked over to Yonsei, a nearby university, and along the way we stopped in a few shops (I bought a white winter hat with a pompom on top and some earrings) and Angela showed me Migliore, one of the bigger department stores. Ang and I took some hilarious sticker photos, which is like A Thing To Do in Korea. And it’s so intense, because you not only take the pictures in the booth (you have the option of putting on costume garments that the shop provides) but you go to a computer screen afterwards and pick borders and little icons to put on the photos, and you can use a pen option to write words or little drawings on them as well before you press print. I had one of them made into a little keychain. I would do this ALL THE TIME if I lived in Asia. We walked around one of the nearby neighborhoods called Sinchon and stopped at a book and DVD café (where you can borrow books or magazines to read or go watch a DVD in a room with your coffee or tea – Sinchon ND Gallery & Book Café, www.ndbookcafe.com).

We sampled yummy foods on one floor of the Hyundai department store in Sinchon before hopping on the metro to Apkujeong to meet Jeong for dinner. I tried dok mandoo kook (I believe this is a dumpling and rice cake soup) and then noodles with radish vegetable and some more dumplings. We passed by the first McDonald’s to open in Seoul, then Corey met us at Once in a Blue Moon, a really fun if somewhat pricy jazz club.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007
I slept in hardcore and met Angela in Insadong (the artsy-teahouse-y-gallery-y neighborhood) at 4 p.m. We walked down the main street, sampling street food as usual, and wandering into a cool vintage tchochtke place where Ang said her parents went when they were students. We passed by a kind of shopping mall centered around a courtyard that had an Andy Warhol homage in it. After some more funny picture-taking, we hunted down a nearby NYT-recommended restaurant called Parksee Restaurant and at bulgogi (barbecued you wrap in lettuce with yummy sauce).

We headed over to the shopping district Myeongdung, which has a big outdoor market and a Migliore department store (outside of which we watched an American Idol type competition that was hilarious). Then we took a cable car up to the top of Namsan mountain/hill and walked around the base of the Seoul Tower. It was rather chilly, and since we were already higher up than anything else in Seoul we didn’t think it was worth it to pay to go up to the observation deck of the Tower. So we had some hot drinks in the café at the base of the tower and, passing a restoration of the structure the government used to send smoke signals back in the day, took the cable car back down.

When I got back to Corey’s, I joined him for my second dinner, his first, at a soup place near him (Samsung metro stop!). Then he bought four beers at 7-11 and gave me a blind taste test. I liked Prime best, followed by OB Blue, Cass, and some lite option. We watched Love Actually (only the best movie ever) while finishing up the beers.

Thursday, January 25, 2007
I took an 11 a.m. train to Wonju, a town about two hours southeast of Seoul where Julia is living and teaching English on her Fulbright fellowship. Julia had given me explicit instructions for what to say to the cab driver when I got off the train. I wrote it down as “Sew Wonju chodung hakyou myung ree-un eeedung.” I somehow arrived unscathed at Seo-Wonju Elementary School and found the classroom where Julia was teaching 6th graders as part of an English winter camp (the students were technically in the middle of their three-month winter vacation). I sat in the back quietly and watched Julia teach her kids how to do a collage with magazine cutouts about their likes and dislikes and then go over the Shel Silverstein poem “Sister for Sale.” Julia brought me to the front of the class and had her students ask me questions in English – I got the usual: How old are you, Where are you from, etc.; but I also got asked if I had a boyfriend (Julia had warned me about this) and what kind of music I liked and how long I had been in Korea. When I said two days, they gasped.

After class, we returned to Julia’s host family’s apartment in a big residential complex nearby where the mom embraced me and served us lunch. Rae-huan, 6, the youngest child in the family and just plain old adorable, scampered around excitedly. Julia and I hopped on a bus and took a walk through Wonju’s alleyway market, stopping in a lingerie shop and a makeup shop and a stationery shop. We returned back to the apartment in time for a delicious dinner (japchae!) with the family. It was then that I met Shi-huan, 11, and Do-huan, 13. I also met the father, who teaches traditional Korean music at a prestigious boarding school. After playing with the kids, Julia and I went to sleep, sharing her bed, which has no box spring but rather a marble slab underneath the mattress that is supposed to be good for one’s back.

Friday, January 26, 2007

After a breakfast of cereal, Julia and I decided to go to the jimjuban, or the baths. Going to the baths is a common pastime in much of Asia, but Koreans have their own particular way of doing things (N.B. this way was markedly different than when I went to the baths in Beitou, outside of Taipei, on my last day in Asia.). The baths work like this: when you walk in, you get a towel and a pair of standard-issue shorts and a T-shirt, and then you leave your shoes in a small locker downstairs. Then the place splits into the men and women’s locker rooms and the gender’s respective baths. In the locker rooms, you strip down to nothing and place your clothes and bags and such in a bigger locker whose key is attached to an anklet. Then you take the little basket of bath and shower goodies and accessories that you have brought along and head into the bath area.

There, the first thing you do is take a shower, which you can either do standing up or sitting on a very low stool (stacks of them are provided near the door). Julia and I stood up because I were a little uneasy about how many butts had been on the stools before ours. But just observing the scene was fascinating: these women scrub themselves very vigorously, and many of them had infants or toddlers with them who also received a good scrubbing.

After the scrub-down, you can enter one of the several baths (different temperatures or minerals in each one) or saunas (different temperatures, but all steaming). There were also baths that had massaging jets of water and a high-pressure shower under which you stood waist-deep in water and let the pounding jets massage your shoulders, back, and head.

After experimenting with all the single-sex bathing options, we dried off and put on our shorts and t-shirts and went upstairs to the co-ed section, where there were massage chairs, a computer lab, a café and restaurant, a big TV and more saunas of various temperatures (ranging from the ice room to a room of about 150 degrees F) with different accessories (slabs of rock to lie upon, woven mats and pillows to lie on, etc.). The jimjilbang costs one price for an unlimited usage, and Julia has even stayed in one in Seoul. The people who stay overnight get mats that they lay out in the big open area in front of the TV, and we saw some people who were just taking a mid-morning nap out there.

We were picked up at noon and shuttled back to school for the “closing ceremony” of the English camp, which lasted for about five minutes. A bunch of Julia’s teacher colleagues joined us (and treated us!) to lunch at a place where everyone sits on cushions at a low table. We had some barbecued meat and the usual zillions of side dishes, but the main course was a tofu mixture that brewed and bubbled as we stirred it over a small stove at our table. After lunch, we met up with the students downtown for an afternoon outing at the movies. We saw Ms. Potter, which Julia and I enjoyed but the male students found “boring.” After ice cream at Baskin Robbins, Julia and I headed back to the apartment, where we played with the kids and learned a bit about Korean music from the father. He apparently owns a rather rare and ancient kind of medicine ball that sounds like a faint bell when shaken gently. He also can play music from a blade of grass, which was very cool.

Two of the most memorable things about the apartment was a poster on the wall displaying the Korean alphabet (for Rae-huan to learn) and the multiple freezers for kimchi (fermented cabbage) storage. The poster was remarkable because Korean is very systematic – invented at the order of King Sejong in 1446, the characters are divided into four quadrants and there are a set number of symbols that can go in each quadrant to create different consonant and vowel sounds. In Korean, unlike Chinese or Japansese, the characters contain circular parts. Along one axis of the poster ran the different consonant sounds, and along the perpendicular axis ran the vowel sounds, and the squares in the middle displayed all the possible combinations. Very orderly, very sensible! And the kimchi refrigerators were amazing – for a medium-sized apartment, I believe I counted three of them! Apparently, every region in Korea has kimchi-making season (Wonju’s is in November), and then all the various types are stored and taken out in bits for consumption for the rest of the year. Crazy!

Julia and I were chauffeured with much fanfare to the bus station (Julia says driving in Korea, at least with her family, is a little wild – talking on the cell phone and a little TV in the car and the kids climbing around not buckled in makes it easy for the adults to get distracted!) and they bid us farewell as if I were a part of the family, too. When we got back to Seoul, we waited for Corey to get out of work, ate bulgogi at a 24-hour place nearby, and gave Julia the beer preference test before watching the DVD of Bend It Like Beckham that her mom had sent.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

I slept in a little and met Julia and her Fulbright friend Colleen in Itaewon (the ex-pat neighborhood) after they had secured plane tickets for their trip to Southeast Asia in February. During our search for a place to have lunch we discovered What the Book, a wonderful English-language bookstore carrying both new and used books. Julia mail-orders from them in Wonju (shipping is free if you order enough books), but the three of us spent a happy hour browsing the shelves and alerting each other when we came upon an interesting title. We ate lunch at a gimbap place (sort of like Korean sushi, an inexpensive treat with various vegetables wrapped in sticky rice). Julia had kimchi fried rice and I had a dish similar to bibimbap but with noodles instead of rice. The three of us walked over to the very worthwhile war memorial and the war museum (www.warmemo.co.kr), where inside we looked through exhibits about Korea’s incessant struggle to maintain autonomy from the beginning of time up though the Korean War, and outside we got to go into old tanks and fighter jets with lots of little kids. I liked the innovative “turtle boat” from 1592.

During vacation from her school in the south of Korea, Colleen was working at an internship with the American embassy in Seoul and living with some other Fulbright people in the eerily suburban-looking Anytown, U.S.A. located inside the fenced-in army base near Itaewon and the War Museum. On our way back to Colleen’s place, she stopped at the Commissary (an entirely AMERICAN grocery store), and Julia requested peanut butter and Reese’s Pieces and chocolate chips (hard items to come by in Korea). We had to wait outside because you need a base ID in order to enter the store, which takes both dollars and Korean won. (As a side note, it’s almost 1,000 Korean won for one dollar, so a million won is only a thousand dollars, and Julia said its hard to get used to the idea of having millions of won in her bank account.) After marveling at the fact that we were walking through any suburban street in America while smack-dab in the middle of Seoul (i.e. the street signs were in miles, not kilometers), we had some freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies at Colleen’s and chatted with her other roommates.

We headed back to Corey’s to shower and get ready for our night our with the myriad Harvard people living in Seoul. We met up with Naupaka and Eddie and Eddie’s girlfriend and Angela in Gangnam, where we first went to a bar called Castle Praha, where we had a ton of beer, and then to a second bar, where we had rice wine and some appetizers, and then to a third bar, where we got a giantpitcher of beer that Naupaka chugged. Along the way, Corey’s friend from Princeton Review, Greg, joined us, and the whole gang went to a 24-hour noraebang (karaoke) place. Noraebang in Korea is a classy affair – we had a big room to ourselves with nice couches and coffee tables and armchairs, and we were provided with maracas and bongo drums and tambourines and snacks. We all got really into it and jumped around and danced a lot and took some hilarious pictures. When we finally left the noraebang place, it was about 2 a.m., but we decided to go to a nearby club (called the “Noise Basement Outstanding Hip-Hop Club NB, according to the business card) because I wanted to see what that scene was like. It was super-crowded and a little techno-y for my tastes, and Julia, Angela, and I immediately lost Naupaka and Corey. I danced half-heartedly with a nice Korean from Texas, and after that we three girls felt like heading out. But we couldn’t find the guys anywhere! We split up to look for them and agreed to meet back at the coat check. It was a good thing I had insisted on holding onto our coat check tag because all of our things were stuffed into one big plastic bag, and if Corey had held onto it we wouldn’t have been able to get our coats or our purses. Angela found Corey off dancing aimlessly somewhere, and she brought him back to our meeting point. I circled the club in search of Naupaka to no avail, and seeing as how it was 4:30 in the morning at that point, we decided to take his sweater and coat with us and pray that he would get home all right.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Julia headed back to Wonju at about 10 a.m., while Corey and I slept until 4:30 p.m. (!), the latest I slept on my entire trip! We met Angela at COEX (Corey took a quick detour into the subway to give Naupaka – who had no idea how he had gotten back to his apartment – back his clothing) and we ate dinner. I had buckwheat noodles, Ang had bibimbap, Corey had pork cutlet with udon (noodles).

Then we went to a board game café with a large selection (another Korean cultural phenomenon that I love, where you sit at a table with your friends and “order” various games for set amounts of time). I taught Corey and Angela Rummikub and we had coffee/a green tea latte/hot chocolate respectively. I wish they had these in the US. There must be one in New York, and I know the bubble tea place on JFK street has board games… but it should be a cool thing to do, like it is in Korea. Because it’s fun, and it means you don’t have to buy your own board games! After some ice cream at McDonald’s/Baskin Robbins and some more wandering around the mall, we headed back to make it an early night.

Monday, January 29, 2007
I arose later than I had hoped and made it to Gyeongbukgung (the famous palace of the Joseon dynasty, founded by Kind Taejo, built in 1395) in time for the noontime English tour. Its literature touts it as “Korea’s representative cultural asset.” The palace itself had a lot of interesting architectural features and the tour guide had some funny stories about relationships between kings and their wives and their various living quarters that made the group chuckle. All the buildings basically look the same but it was cool nonetheless to hear what the different parts of the palace were used for. It’s also situated at the northeastern side of the city and that particular spot was chosen because it was surrounded by mountains on all sides, so it was very cool to be standing in one of the many courtyards of this palace and be able to see a mountain in each of the north, south, east, and west directions. The palace also holds significance because it was destroyed TWICE by Japanese (once in 1592 [restored by King Gojung in 1868] and once in 1910 [restored in 1990]) and part of it are just getting restored. We passed a construction site where there used to be Japanese government building, but it was torn down and historically accurate mistresses quarters are being built in its place.

On the tour I met, among other people, a lovely couple whose Canadian son is getting married to a Korean, and the wife gets to wear a traditional hanbok and everything, and they were very excited about it. The wife was very proudly sporting a pin with crossing Korean and Canadian flags. My favorite part of the palace was these two pagoda-type things that were in the middle of their respective lakes; one large one (Gyeonghoem) for big dinners with military and state officials, and another more tranquil one (Hwangwonjeong) meant specifically for the kind’s quiet time. After the tour, I went on to the Folk Museum with the Canadian couple bent on absorbing their future daughter-in-law’s culture. They told me there are 19,000 Canadians teaching English in Korea. I was impressed by the museum, which had exhibits on everything from Korean music and architecture to a very cool room that had a sort of life cycle of a Korean – starting with traditional birthing and naming ceremonies through adolescent rites and marriage customs and funeral rites. My favorite room, though, had to be the one devoted to all things kimchi – complete with dioramas of little plastic people harvesting, cooking, soaking, fermenting, storing, and eating the zillions of different types. I also saw a special exhibit on the imminent and very lucky Year of the Pig and learned that it is the last of the 12 animals, that its “direction” is Northwest by North,” its time equivalent is 9-11 p.m., and because it has large litters it is a sign of progeny and prolific reproduction. The Korean word for pig is “don” which sounds like the word for money and good fortune.

I left the museum starving and walked to nearby Insadong (the artsy neighborhood), where I ate a FANTASTIC late lunch of bibimbap at Gogung (www.gogung.co.kr), a restaurant in the basement of the shopping center Ssamziegil where Ang and I had seen the homage to Andy Warhol. On this day, however, there was a traditional Korean musical show in the courtyard, and what had been plastic umbrellas hung overhead had turned into multicolored hanbok. Very cool. After lunch I walked to Jogyesa temple, one of the Buddhist temples. It was built in 1910 and somehow has hours from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. It has an important seven-story stupa built in 1910 under which is buried a sarira, or part of the calcified relics of Buddha after cremation and brought form India, and you are supposed to walk around it seven times for good luck.

I tried to go to Deoksugung Palace, but the hours in Lonely Planet weren’t accurate because it closes early in the winter. I then had time to kill before I met Ang for dinner, so I wandered into a nearby park where men were playing Chinese chess. There were some food and drink stalls set up, and I checked to see if they had anything interesting. It was only then I noticed that men kept on coming up and buying the same drink, and as I looked close I realized it was soju (the notoriously heinous-tasting alcohol). At three in the afternoon! I wandered into an area Ang had recommended that I go, called Cheongyye Stream, which was built only recently. Basically, there was a large main avenue in Seoul, and the government gutted the middle part of it and built this random stream that’s in a sunken area about 20 feet below where all the cars drive (the cars on the cross-streets drive over small bridges to cross the road). There are periodic steps down to the stream, and there are small paths on either side where, it seems, even on a freezing day in January, families and lovebirds like to stroll.

I hopped on the subway and met Ang at Hongdae, the area where Hongik University is and, she says, a very happening place. It was a little early for dinner, so we did two hours of quality noraebang (KTV) at a posh place aptly called Prince Edward (or something like that. It was fancy and British-sounding). Our room had flowered wallpaper and a fancy table and a banquette-style couch. The lobby had chandeliers and a grand staircase. We dimmed the lights and put on the disco ball and crooned, Ang throwing on some Korean ballads for fun. Oh, and Brian McKnight, because apparently he is all the rage in Korea. We went to a cute place nearby (www.ralrara.net, the groovy sounds for the groovy people with groovy bossa mellomelodic moods, ccording to the business card) that sells flavored soju (we had strawberry and orange soju) and also little food that you have with alcohol, but I forget the Korean word for that. We had an omelette-type thing. A little tipsy and giggly, I headed back to Corey’s.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Having been told that I should definitely go to the DMZ (demilitarized zone between North and South Korea), I had purchased my rather expensive ticket ($50!) over the phone with the USO. I took the train with the very early morning commuters and walked through snow in order to get to the USO offices on the American army base in Seoul by 7 a.m. I bought a pancake breakfast in this red white and blue 1950’s-style diner within the USO offices, and it was wild to think that I was in the middle of Seoul, chatting with a US army guy over pancakes.

We boarded the bus to take us to the DMZ and were told that we might not go because of snow. Everyone groaned. This gave me the opportunity to look around and see who was on the tour – there was a group of on-leave military personnel stationed in Wonju (where Julia lives!), as well as your typical lot of American and European tourists, many of whom either were or are teaching English in Korea. We finally set off, and when we entered Camp Bonifas Panmunjeom, a US army guy from Haiti stationed there boarded our bus and introduced himself. We then filed into a conference room and he gave us a PowerPoint presentation with maps of the area and told us a little bit about what we were going to see. The first slide contained this phrase: “United Nations Command: Guardians of the Korean Armistice.” Everything was very strict, very orderly. We had to wear official badges and walk in two straight lines and go only where we were led by our army guides and our ROK (Republic of Korea) armed guardsmen.

The DMZ is the four kilometers south and north of the 28th parallel, which is the MDL, or military demarcation line. A small part of the DMZ surrounding the MDL is the JSA, or the joint security area. We drove into the southern part of DMZ on our way to the part of the MDL that we could see, passing mine fields and fences with rocks stuck in them so that the military could know if anyone had fiddled with them.

We first went to the so-called Peace Hall, where we walked up a flight of steps (in our two lines, of course) and walked out the back onto a sort of plateau with steps leading down. We were permitted within a certain area of the plateau in our two lines and we could under no circumstances go down the steps. We also couldn’t point or wave or laugh, and they actually made a point of saying that if you tend to be expressive with your hands while you are talking, then put your hands in your pockets. From where we were standing, we could see a row of one-story small buildings in front of us, separated by a line of small white posts, and, past that, another large building with steps leading down on which a North Korean guard was standing, menacingly. The ROK guards with our group were standing menacingly, too, as were other ROK guards standing on our side, half-behind the buildings, our guides explained, because that made it more difficult for the North Koreans to keep tabs on the guards’ every moment. As we were standing on the steps, our guides told us to smile, because we’d been photographed about 100 times by various cameras – video and still – set up on the North Korean side. After this intro, we filed down the steps into one of the buildings (for negotiation meetings) that literally straddles the MDL. It is just one room and it has an oval table and chairs in it. A line of mini-speakers down the middle of the table marks where the MDL is inside the building. There are also two small translator booths and a bunch of flags that are framed and mounted on the South Korean side. Our guides told us that they used to fly on mini-flagpoles on the oval table, but that apparently one North Korean tour group was in there and they started walking on all the tables and knocking down the flags. So they had them put under glass and put on the wall to prevent that from happening. North Korean tour groups still walk on the tables, apparently when the South Korean tours come in they often see footprints. While we were in this room, the door to the South Korean side is locked from the inside, and we had one soldier guarding each entrance and another standing in the middle of the room at the head of the oval table. When we left, our guides said, the ROK soldier would unlock the door leading out onto the North Korean side so that their tours could access the room.

We then filed back onto the bus and were taken to an observation deck near a small building from which we could see the two towns in the DMZ. The Tae Song Dong “Freedom Village” has about 70 residents. The residents of this little town are exempt from taxes, and they are given land on which to farm and it is guaranteed that the government will buy whatever they produce. A good deal, right? But to live IN the DMZ, within sight of the North Korean army base? I don’t know… it’s a moot point, since no one is allowed to move there unless they marry someone already living in the village. The village also contains a large flagpole flying the South Korean flag. Across the MDL, on the North Korean side, there is another village, called Gi Jong Dong or “Propaganda Village.” It’s comprised of a cluster of buildings and a gigantic GIANT flagpole flying the North Korean flag, and it is said there is a loudspeaker system throughout the town that plays recordings attesting to the government’s wonderfulness, however, it has been confirmed that nobody lives there. The buildings are actually empty…

Back on the bus, we passed by the “Bridge to Nowhere.” The infamous story goes like this: near the South Korean side of the bridge there was a rather large tree whose branches where obscuring some of their surveillance of the North Korean side. In 1976, base personnel sent a few army guys out to prune the branches, and suddenly a host of North Koreans ran over the bridge (which is over land, by the way, not water) and massacred the tree-trimmers. This massacre was repeatedly referenced on our tour as one of the many signs that the North Koreans are generally irrational and violent for no good reason.

We heard another mini-speech by a US army official (who spoke in a very brusque manner with his arms crossed) while we sat in auditorium style seating in building with a large window looking out across the MDL. In front of the banked seating was a largescale model of the various North Korean landmarks so that we could identify what we saw through the window by comparing it to the model. Adjacent to the auditorium was another observation deck, but by this time many of us were cold, and it was the same view as before, pretty much, consisting of low brown craggy hills and some scattered buildings. Basically no movement whatsoever. It was very bleak looking, but I really do think that’s because it was winter. I don’t think many North Koreans actually live in or near their DMZ, though we could see off in the distance what we were told was an inhabited town (unlike the Propaganda Village), and on a clear day, our guides said, you can make out a giant statue of Kim I that’s there.

From there we were taken to one of the four tunnels that the North Koreans made surreptitiously in an attempt to forge a passageway under the DMZ. South Koreans accidentally discovered this tunnel in 1978 when they were drilling boreholes (a word repeated by our guides – I guess it just means holes deep underground?) for a separate project, and that led them to search for (and subsequently discover) the other subterranean infiltrations. When confronted with these discoveries over a period of time from the 70s to the 90s, the North Koreans apparently responded that they were intended for North Korean use (water or some such thing), and that they had inadvertently dug over to the South Korean side of the MDL. The South Koreans scoffed at this, and now they emphasize to all DMZ tour groups that the North Koreans were trying to create a means for 10,000 troops to be transported to the South Korean side in one hour through a space 1,635m x 2m x 2m. They use a map of the four tunnels and their proximity to Seoul (the one that got the closest was about 52 km away) to demonstrate what a serious threat the tunnels would have been had they not been discovered. We donned hard hats and went down into tunnel #3, which was surprisingly wide and had sufficient head-room. We marched single file as far as we could go towards the MDL’s underground equivalent (a door blocked our way) then turned around and walked back. The highlight?: a sign pointing out the location of that oh-so-crucial borehole. Near the tunnel entrance was a building with an exhibition about the history of the North and South Korean conflict, but at that point I was burned out and exhausted, so after a cursory sweep I boarded the bus and we headed back to Seoul soon after.

After arriving back to the USO offices, I took a cab over to THE street (Yongsan) with all the electronics stores and outdoor stalls, in search of a webcam or a wireless mouse or SOMETHING, but came up empty-handed. I did have fun browsing, though. I saw a sign for a nearby E-Mart, which is Korea’s answer to Target and France’s Carrefour (which is all over Asia). I ate a box ChocoPies (a lovely cookie in the Mallomar vein, two graham cracker ovals with marshmallow between them and the whole thing covered in chocolate) while browsing the merchandise. I ended up with a great pair of kitchen scissors for Mom for about $2. I noticed that in Korea (well, at least at restaurants and at Julia’s host family’s place), they use biggish scissors to cut meat (raw and cooked) and vegetables and even small fruits rather than knives. Mom says this was the most useful thing I bought her. And I thought that electronic fly swatter from Taipei was a pragmatic purchase.

When I got back to Corey’s, I slept for most of the evening and read The Dante Club, which indulges my weird obsession with historical fiction about Harvard…and when Corey got back I was too wiped to even hit the town with him. Bummer.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Corey didn’t have to work until the afternoon, so we headed to Daehangno for an early lunch at Nolboojip, a restaurant that Lonely Planet said was a must. We were served the typical two thousand little side dishes along with rice and some bigger dishes as part of a lunch special, but the coolest part was when we finished our rice, they poured hot water in and made us a kind of traditional burned rice tea, which sounds bad but is comforting in a charred kind of way. We took a nice meander around that neighborhood and saw, most notably, a sign advertising that RENT was playing in Seoul, and it featured a Korean actor playing Roger! Cool! We walked around Dongdaemun market for a little while, and I was awed by the various stalls in a huge building selling all different kinds of yarn and fabric and custom-made hanbok (tranditional Korean garb). Women squatted over low stools in small groups, chucking and chatting, as their needles clicked away and beautiful scarves and sweaters appeared, little by little, between their hands. Corey left to prepare for his class, and I continued to wander around the markets, purchasing some street food (of course). I hopped a cab over to Namdaemun, the other big market, hoping to find a stationery store I had read about in Lonely Planet, but instead I just came across a bunch of wholesale jewelry stores and a few camping stores amidst the usual market stalls. I did by a pack cover though, for about $8, so I suppose the trip was worth it.

I met Ang for our last dinner together or Apku (sad!), which was at another restaurant where you sit on cushions on the floor. We went to a place nearby and did TWO rounds of sticker photos, and then went to a chain of café/bakery places called A Twosome Place (a name I find hilarious). Back on the MRT, we bid farewell as Ang got off a few stops before me and I headed back to Samsung.