1) I GOT MY PHONE FIXED. Truthfully, I didn't try that hard to fix my phone and went to one place. They told me I couldn't do it there after I waited two hours so i got discouraged, but then I was talking to my roommate and he yelled at me because 1) I didn't tell him about my phone not being able to be fixed situation and 2) if I had told him sooner I wouldn't have had to wait two weeks. We went to a shop like 3 minutes away, waited 20 minutes, and then had the phone fixed in less than 15. Iy cost about $70 USD, and a quick google search revealed that apple can charge as much as $150 or more for a digitizer replacement so I think it was worth it.
2) I GOT A TATTOO! The tattoo I've been wanting for a while!! It was a really interesting experience, since tattoo shops are technically illegal in Korea. My roommate wanted to go so I decided to do it in Korea as well. We went to "playground tattoo." It was a little more expensive than a tattoo would be in the US, and we went to a shop that is famous too. It was hidden in the basement of an apartment building, with a sign that was literally like 6 inches big on the door. We had to message the artist first on kakao and then he gave us the address, but when we walked in it was really cool and modern. Plus, it didn't hurt at all! But it healed really fast since it is pretty small!
3) I was a supporter for HanMi Camp, the day camp that NSLIY organizes for cultural exchange between the Korean high schoolers and American high schoolers. It was pretty fun but brutally hot so I felt really sorry for the students. They had to make a video and they were so tired I completely understand why they didn't really want to do it. We went to Gwanghwamun and got calligraphy for free! We tried to go to Starbucks since there is a 50% sale that was going on, but it was super crowded so we went somewhere else instead.
4) I went to the DMZ! It was super interesting and I learned a lot. The most interesting part of the tour was going into one of the tunnels that North Korean soldiers had dug to try and orchestrate an attack on Seoul. I believe it was found in the 70s and 80s, and it is 25 stories underground, with pockets in the walls where they had planned on putting explosives. Going down, the walkway was so slanted I had to run a little, and going up was so brutal I didn't know if I would make it haha. We were allowed to go around 500 meters into the tunnel and then it was blocked off by barbed wire.
But the visit really put into perspective that South Korea really was still at war- every male has to do mandatory military service for 21 months (it used to be longer) and they get paid $150 a month for their service. Going into the DMZ all of our documents were checked and double checked, and our bus was boarded by soldiers three times upon entering and twice as we were leaving. The Civilian Controlled Area, between the DMZ and South Korea, was covered in sections of barbed wire where land mines were still being found and taken out of the ground. In fact, the majority of the soldiers working in the Civilian Controlled Area are assigned to taking land mines out the ground and disabling them. There is a small farming village in the Civilian Controlled Area, and all of the inhabitants are tax exempt and males there are exempt from military service, but there is curfew at night and soldiers count the civilians right after curfew ends. Plus, they have to live there for 9 out of the 12 months in a year to receive the benefits of living there.
We went to two observation decks, one of which looked right into a propaganda village, built by NK after they realized the amount of tourists looking into their country from right outside the DMZ. It consists of a few apartment complexes, most of them two or three stories tall, and most of which are uninhabited. The North Korea flag and South Korea flag also fly across from each other at this observation deck, and when I saw the flag I got goosebumps. It was so close- a 20 minute walk from our location- but yet the countries are so different. Behind me on the South Korean side was huge clusters of apartment buildings as tall as skyscrapers even though we were almost 2 hours out of Seoul. On the North Korean side was dirt roads, empty houses, and mountains barren of trees as the country continues to cut them down since they can't afford fossil fuels. On the second observation deck we looked over a river into North Korea. This part of the DMZ was divided by a natural barrier so there was no barbed wire, no walls- just a river separating South Korea and the military outpost we were at and the NK farming village. If we looked through telescopes we could see houses, cows, roads, laundry drying on lines, and a rare glimpse of someone working in a field or walking in our line of sight. It was mind boggling. South Korea is not perfect by any means- work and school culture (where many students spend 16 hours or more in school) is so intense that Korea has the highest suicide rate of the developed world, gender inequality is widespread with women getting paid 63.4 cents to every dollar a man makes despite putting off marriage later and later and getting a "head start" because of the mandatory military service of men, and political corruption and the problems of going from a third world country to a first world country in a little over 30 years are still felt today. However, compared to the North Korea, a country with arguably the worst human rights violations on the face of the planet, where labor camps punish generations of children for the mistakes of one person and mass starvation is not uncommon, South Korea is a paradise. Reunification is a dream of the older generation, who remembers a time before the separation, but the younger generation isn't so keen on paying for the massive amount of support NK would need if reunification ever became a possibility.
A train with bullet holes from the war
prayers for reunification
A train station, fully staffed and prepared to send a train immediately into North Korea if reunification ever happens, waits patiently within the civilian controlled area of the DMZ.
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