19 days

I'm down to 19 days left in the place that has been home for two years now. It's still weird packing up my stuff and figuring things out. Today I was watching tv and I saw a strange commercial. Granted most commercials are pretty weird here anyway, but this was was a real treat.

I saw a kid running on the beach towards his mother. The child, not sure if it was a boy or a girl, got to mom and ran into her. The young age of the child made his/her head hit his mother's chest. Mom's chest wasn't miniscule like typical korean mothers, but neither was it like Pam Anderson's, if you get my drift. Then, as the child's head bounces in slow-motion, the image cuts away to an inflating airbag. Yeah, an airbag. So an airbag is like mom's boobs. That's what I got from this commercial. Awesome.

In other news, yesterday was my last holiday here. Mina and I planned to drive up to Panmunjeom, the DMZ tour that actually takes you into the DMZ. Sounds cool, huh? Well, I'm hoping it was cool because we weren't able to go there because it was a national holiday. Oh well! But we did go to a stop on the tour that was 7 km from the DMZ. It was a park/memorial area called Imjingak. There were alot of people there, but it was still nice. Though we got a snack when we arrived from a vendor and it was really gross corn and chicken. Blech. So much for being hungry!

We walked around and took pictures and, I got a kick out of this, the announcer who spoke about the railway bridge as we were walking up to it switched to english. I think he must have noticed that there was finally a white person there (that was the weird thing- it's a tourist spot and I was the only whitey?) and sounded very enthusiastic about telling the information about this place in english over the loudspeaker. So I felt obligated to stay 'til he was finished. It was interesting though. Imjingak is the site of a railway line that used to connect both North and South Korea. In 1950 it was destroyed during the war after being used to transport refugees both ways. It was rebuilt in 2000, though I'm unsure if it's actually being used. Maybe it's just waiting to be used again. Anyway, after wondering if the land across the river was indeed DPRK all day, I did some research at home. It's not North Korea across the bridge. It's not even a river I was looking at. The river is a little further off (we rode next to it on the way home) and what I was looking at was a stream connected to the river. So there you have it. I was thrown off because there didn't seem to be nearly enough security if we really were that close to the DMZ and DPRK. I have seen North Korea while I've been here, though. But it looks like visiting the DMZ isn't going to happen for me this time around.


This last picture is of the two bridges- on the right are the ruins of the original bridge. On the left is the rebuilt bridge.