Epilogue: What will you do with this?

I have enough drafts of this blog post in my recycling bin to kill a cybernetic tree.  It is a good thing I draft these on a computer.  Cyber trees can regrow quite quickly.

My Grandpa told me a story, that when he broke his ankle, all of his pastor friends came and visited him and offered their sympathy.  After they had all left, a chaplain nun came in and asked him “What will you do with this?”

Most people underestimate how much reentry sucks.  Even when you are warned, you underestimate it.  Even when you have been through it before (coming back from Holden) you underestimate it.  I figured that I had gone through 9 countries worth of culture shock.  There was nothing that America could come at me with that I hadn’t already been through.  How wrong I was.

The thing about culture shock in another country is that you, for the most part, if you come in with a fairly open mind and a desire to understand, you can learn a great deal.  And even if you disagree completely with something, you can comfort yourself in the knowledge that, if it was ever really THAT bad, you would eventually go home where things are normal.

So what do you do when you come into a culture that you already know, and find just foreign enough to be disconcerting?

The thing that I cannot seem to reckon with, no matter how hard I try, it the apathy that most Americans have for most social issues.  There is no engagement with politics, with social issues, with anything.  Every other country I visited (with the exception of Switzerland), when people weren’t happy they would protest.  We don’t even vote half the time!

But I guess the real shock to my system has come in the relative lack of excitement my life has.  There is very little to do in Northfield besides study or go into town, and the town is not that big!  I was used to doing something everyday.  Or if nothing else, encountering a different culture everyday, which took energy and was exciting even in itself.  Here, I do the same things everyday, and most of those things involve sitting.  I get so bored sometimes!  The problem is that my course load is heavy enough that I don’t have time to do much else, even if I wanted to.

I’ve had a good two-month pity party for myself.  The people around me have offered me sympathies as best they are able.  But that has not gotten me anywhere.  If anything, it has just made things worse.  The question now is what am I going to do with this? 

I don’t really know the answer to that right now.  In the long term I know I want to go abroad again.  But in the shorter term, it is a matter of figuring out what I have learned on global and applying it wherever I am.  It is a matter in finding the adventures around me, or making my own if I must.  But for some reason (and I would like to think that there is a reason), there has been lit in me a fire to do something.  What, I don’t know.  But I guess that is what I have to figure out.

Helena McMillan says that you never completely fully readjust.  And maybe that is not a bad thing.  But no matter what happens, it has been a life changing adventure, one that I will never forget.

A Temple to Call My Own

I did what I promised what I would not do: leave this blog post for months without writing it.  So I apologize for that.

Tokyo!  It is definitely not what I was expecting.  Despite the fact that it is the biggest metropolitan area in the world (30 million), it is one of the most calm, peaceful cities that I have visited, perhaps second only to Geneva.

You hear horror stories about the Tokyo metro, about how it is ridiculously crowded, and that there are people whose job it is to push you in.  While it is quite crowded during rush hour, it is pretty much on par with Hong Kong or Shanghai subway trains during rush hour.  During non rush hour, we were usually able to sit down, something that was somewhat rare on Hong Kong and Shanghai lines.  And in Hong Kong was the only place where we had to wait multiple trains before we could get on because there were so many people.

The people in Tokyo are really nice.  I mean, ridiculously nice.  I had some issues booking our hostel (I mistyped my email), so they found me on facebook and sent a message saying “were you the one who wanted to book with us?”  If you are ever looking for a hostel in Tokyo, that is probably the best, cheapest, least sketchy, place there is.  Except their breakfast is a rip off.  It is basically $3 for unlimited toast and vegetable soup.

We stayed at Sakura Hostel in the Asakusa area, which was relatively centrally located in Tokyo. I say relatively, because really you cannot go many places in Tokyo without taking a half an hour subway ride, no matter where you are located in the city.  We were about a five minute walk away from a station.  To get to said station, the most direct route was to walk through Sensō-ji, Tokyo’s oldest and most significant temple (Wikipedia’s words, not mine).  Though a Buddhist shrine, it also has Shinto elements and plays host every year to a major Shinto festival (yay Eastern Asian universalism!).   We got to know the temple grounds quite well, as we were there multiple times each day. The alternative was to walk around the site, which tripled our walking time (a mistake we made the first night while lugging suitcases). It became our little temple, where we could watch other eager tourists snap pictures while we would just casually walk through (we spent our first full day being those tourist, fear not).

The second day we woke up at 3 in the morning to get to the fish market at 5 am in order to watch the Tuna auction at 6am.  Early in the morning, fishermen bring in their catch of tuna, 2 to 3 feet long, and restaurant owners come and inspect them. Then the fish are auctioned off to the highest bidder.  After watching this, we returned to our hostel and slept (more than we intended).  We returned to the fish market for a sushi lunch, and thoroughly amused one of the women working there with our various reactions to different kinds of sushi.  Eel was the most controversial in our group, with me loving it and Cassie hating it.  Heather, who at the beginning of the trip said she hated seafood, enjoyed it a lot too.  It just goes to show that you should have good seafood before you decide that you don’t like it.

That afternoon we went up to the top of the Metropolitan Government Building of Tokyo to get a good view of the city.  It is free to go up, as long as you are ok with walking through very official looking government buildings in jeans and t-shirts, getting lost, and then having a friendly business women tell you that you are in the wrong building.  Oops.

Up at the top there were some nice maps telling you what you were looking at, a very expensive café, and a very nice tour guide woman who started talking to David and pointed out to all of us a few more sites that were not on the map.  Had this been India, I would have been very suspicious of her motives.  Heck, I was still a little on edge.  I don’t know if that is cynicism or being smart.

That evening, more to say that we had done it than anything else, we went up in the Tokyo Skytree ($30 total, which is a bit ridiculous).  The view was actually really amazing.  Unlike at the government building, there were no other tall buildings in the way of the view.  We ate dinner in the sky tree (surprisingly cheap – as cheap as anything on the street).  We lost Heather briefly.  I asked a staff member if she had seen a girl with red hair, and she jokingly pointed to a cartoon character on the brochure (yes, it was for sure a joke).  Later, when we passed her again, she felt obligated to apologize.  Conscientiousness to an extreme.

Honestly, the next two days kind of blur together, so I am just going to list the highlights.  We went to the Meiji Shrine, a giant park in the middle of Tokyo in honor of Emperor Meiji, who in the 19^th century modernized Japan in such a way as to save it from being colonized and exploited like much of Eastern Asia.  Walking through the park makes it impossible to feel like you are in a city, more like being in a forest.  Or maybe an arboretum, as it had better paths than a forest would.  In the center is a giant shrine to the Emperor (a temple like building that you are not allowed to enter). 

We visited the Yasukuni Shrine, originally established by Emperor Meiji to commemorate those who had died in Meiji Restoration and other “duty to your country” sort of things.  It has since expanded, and now has a very nice war museum.  I mentioned before that the Korean War museum was biased.  This blew Korea out of the water.  They had justifications for their colonization of Korea (they were basically a Chinese colony already) and for declaring war on the US in WWII (It wasn’t our fault!).  It conveniently left out uncomfortable truths like the poor treatment of Naijing during the Japanese occupation of China.  But at least they had some really cool WWII airplanes!

We also walked through the imperial palace gardens.  The imperial palace is still being lived in, so you really can’t walk through it.  We walked through Harajuku, a district known for its outrageous “fashion” and little boutiques.  I think Heather and I appreciated this significantly more than David and Cassie.  It was also on and off raining, forcing people indoors.  We walked through several other parks (parks seemed to be surprisingly prominent).  We went to a Japanese style tea ceremony.  The place was a relatively new section of a nearby museum, and in order to get their name out they offered to do tea ceremonies for relatively cheap.  Afterwards we went to the museum, which had a special exhibit about clothes from an ethnic group in Northern Japan (I’m sorry that I don’t remember it).

It became a running joke that David was always the last one up.  One morning, we told him that we were leaving half an hour earlier than we intended on leaving.  He wasn’t very happy about that.

On our final full day, we took a bus trip out to Mt. Fuji!  The sky was amazingly clear, and we could see the entire mountain.  That does not always happen!  On the trip, we met a guy from Australia, who had been to Fuji once before, but could barely anything because of the fog.  The one sad thing was that because there had been snowfall the day before, we could only go as high up the mountain as the first station (on good days the bus can drive half way up the mountain, in July and August you can climb to the top).  The day was nice, and the views were amazing.  I think I took more pictures that day than I had in the rest of Japan combined.  After going a little ways up the mountain, we had a picnic lunch, then took a boat across nearby Lake Ashi and took a cable car up Mount Komagatake (relatively speaking it was more of a hill).  We took the bus back through some amazing countryside.  When we got back to Tokyo, the bus driver offered to take us a little closer to our hostel (again, this is Japan, it isn’t sketchy).  When we got off the bus, our tour guide gave each of us four an origami Mt. Fuji! We found a sushi place for dinner.

The next morning we were up and out early to catch our plane.  The plane flight back was fairly uneventful.  When we landed in Chicago it was snowing so much that our flight was canceled (and good thing too, as we wouldn’t have made our flight anyways).  So for five hours we camped out in the Chicago airport, marveled at the fact that everyone spoke English, and slept.  Then we were home, and that was that.

I Made a Gayageum!

To continue on my theme of seeing movies in foreign countries, on Sunday night (the day after going to the DMZ) I went with a few friends to see the movie Frozen.  The movie is adorable, and you really should see it if you haven’t.  The theatre was pretty similar to what we have back in the US, complete with overpriced popcorn and drinks.  The only difference is the commercials before the movie.  There were a lot of commercials for plastic surgery and beauty products.  I guess when half of your country’s culture revolves kpop idol groups, the pressure to look perfect is quite strong.  Apparently in Gangnam, the wealthy neighborhoods south of the Han river in Seoul (yes, that is the same Gangnam of the song Gangnam style), it is basically assumed that a women (and most men) will get plastic surgery after puberty.  I don’t know whether that is disturbing, or just a cultural difference.

Our last week of school, it was time to go into finals mode.  For our St. Olaf prof’s class, we had a speech on kpop on Wednesday, and a final presentation on Friday.  For our South Korea class, we had a final on Thursday (four full essays in three hours :P).  

So bottom line, Monday through Friday I did not do much.  What I did do is create a Gayageum.  For our final music project, we were supposed to take lessons on a traditional instrument, or interview a musician, or create an instrument.  I decided to take some cardboard boxes, twelve spools of thread, some thumb tacks, packing tape, and a ridiculous amount of time to make an instrument.  A gayageum is a 12 stringed zither from Korea (if that means nothing to you, just google a picture).  Mine kind of played.  Kind of.  But what was I really expecting?

Friday night most of the globalites and a lot of the buddies had a goodbye party.  We rented out a private room with a giant tv that could be used for karaoke or video games.  It was really fun, especially after all of the work we had been doing through the week.

Saturday we were all exhausted.  Cassie and I went out for Krispy Kreme donuts, which, while not really Korean, is a food that we would not be able to get at home.  After a little shopping, we ended up back at global house.  That evening, the global group went out to a Korean restaurant for a “last night of global” dinner.  I was sad to realize that I had lost all of my spice tolerance.  I guess it is one of those things that you need to keep up.  Oh well.  Afterwards we went back to the Hodels’ place for talking, reminiscing, and weird banana puff things. 

The next morning, the group headed home had to leave at 5:30 in the morning.  Most of up woke up to see them off (insert judging look at people who did not wake up).  They were originally supposed to leave with the rest of us, but an oversight by the ios office left them scrambling for a plane flight late in the game.  The rest of us were up and out by 8:30.  We got to the airport 4 hours before our flight took off!  I guess better early than late. 

The Hawaii and Japan groups flew into Tokyo together, saying goodbye after we got off the plane.  Then through customs (ma’am, why were you in South Korea?), and we were off and running through Japan!

Andrea

“Do Not Stop Walking for Any Reason”

Even to take a picture.

Those words suddenly become a lot more serious when you remember that you signed a waiver warning that the USA cannot guarantee that you will not be shot and killed while visiting the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

We are being led around by a Kentucky golden boy who does not remove his sunglasses, even when the lights are turned off inside.   All of the other soldiers are ROK (Republic of Korea).  Like golden boy, these soldiers were definitely selected for looks.  I asked another soldier if he had ever served at Panmunjom (the only place in the DMZ that North and South Korean soldiers stare at each other from five feet away).  He laughed at the idea.  He said he didn’t look intimidating enough.  And now I understand why.  The guys at the DMZ tower over our buddies (remember, all males must serve a minimum two year term, so most of our buddies were also army men) and they are built.  They stand at “ROK Ready” position, one which looks extremely intimidating and is a Taekwondo ready position.   And they spend their days staring at North Korean soldiers.  Who stare back at them.

The North Korean side puts their best foot forward too.  But for North Korea, that involves ensuring that your soldiers are well fed.  And when your average height is only 5’ 2”, it is a little hard to compare.  We can only see one man, whose face is obscured by binoculars. 

We are standing in two lines, staring at North Korean soil.  We are separated by a cement line in a gravel lawn.  Golden boy points to a gray building to our right and tells us that it may be taking our picture.  Gray buildings belong to DPRK, while blue were UN.  Behind us is the ROK welcoming house.  So welcoming, that we are not allowed to take pictures of it.  But we can take picture of the DPRK’s welcoming house.  The two houses are the same height to ease tension. 

And tensions are high.  Panmunjom was originally an area in which NK and SK forces could move freely.  But in the 1980s NK soldiers (sorry, “military police”) murdered some SK soldiers with axes as they attempted to prune a tall poplar tree.  After that, it was decided that the demarcation line should be more strictly enforced.

We go into the second UN building, one that straddles the Demarcation Line (the official boarder).  The room is used for negotiations about minor things, such as the fact that the NK soldiers are not wearing their military police badges.  Or how big of a flag they can fly.  That particular meeting took 11 hours, as both sides brought in bigger and bigger flags.  Under the watchful eye of the ROK soldiers (oops, sorry, “military police”) we are allowed to walk on the NK side of the room.

Situated between electric fences, mine fields, and tank walls is the little town of Tae Sung Dong.  The only people allowed to live there are people who lived in the valley before the war.  Or women who have married into the village.  The residents, in exchange for farming a war zone, are tax and military exempt, and farm plots of land 5 times larger than most SK farmers.  It makes for a fairly wealthy community.  I just hope for their sake that war never breaks out again.

On the plus side, the DMZ has become a nature preserve in which many rare species can be found.  If unification ever does occur, I hope they preserve that area.

There is an equivalent town on the NK side, called Kijong-dong, The city used to project propaganda from a loud speaker at all hours.  Once, a SK soldier actually fell for the propaganda, and defected to the north.  Upon reaching the village, he realized that the buildings were hollow shells with painted on doors.  So he came back to the south.  Or so the story goes.  It is probably true.  But the fact of the matter is that SK wages just as heavy of a propaganda war are NK.  I have seen it first hand at the war museum.  I am not saying that I don’t think NK is a pretty miserable place.  But this trip has taught me to be cautious about accepting information at face value.

A few days before, I had visited the Korean War museum.  It was amazingly informative.  The Korean War is something that schools only touch to talk about Domino policy.  But it is a very complicated issue.  It also set off a chain of events, without which you would not have your Samsung Phone or your LG TV (yes, those are both Korean companies).  And no, the US did not come in and immediately save South Korea.  The US left south Korea unprepared for war, then came in themselves unprepared for war (there was the mindset in the US that if we have an atom bomb, we don’t need tanks…Big big mistake). It was only after the UN forces arrive and MacArthur organized a surprise invasion of Incheon that the tide of the war changed.  But while the American view of the Korean war is sadly lacking, the Korean view is not completely unbiased either.  The Koreans are intensely proud of their independence, and ability to do things on their own.  So there is a lot of South Korean propaganda in the museum. But I guess it is their history.  They have the right to tell it as they wish.  And for a country that lacks a really strong sense of historical identity, the Korean War is something that they can be somewhat proud about.

In the 1970s, to get around the fences and mines and walls, NK started to tunnel under the DMZ.  Defectors from the north informed the south of potentially 16 tunnels.  ROK has found four.  NK denies that they made them.  The entrance is outside of the DMZ.  We visit tunnel number three.  There are a lot of Chinese tourists here.  Chinese tourists are not allowed in the DMZ, for security reasons.

If they want, they can visit it from the NK side.  I doubt that happens very often.

I know what you are wondering.  Or at least, I hope you are wondering.  Is there actually any risk of war breaking out? That depends on who you ask. Our buddies are pretty sure that nothing will ever happen.  But there are gas masks in every subway station, just in case.

Andrea