OK, it's been a while since I've had time to put anything up. It's been a pretty hectic couple of weeks with a new semester starting at school, weddings, and booking flights and hotels for our vacation/trip home. I'll go ahead and post a few more pictures from our DMZ trip. For our last day, we spent some time revisiting the hill we played camp games on the night before. The hill was a hotly contested area during the Korean war where thousands of NK, SK, and Chinese soldiers were killed. During construction of the monument, the excavated shells and casings were melted down to create some artistic reliefs that were tributes to important figures and stories from the war. At the top of the hill is a prayer bell. You say a prayer to the bell (usually for reunification) and then ring it. A dragon that sits on top of the bell then sends your prayer to, you guessed it, North Korea. The bell was broken when we went. Next, we went rice planting in part of the restricted civilian area. I guess only farmers and soldiers are allowed into the rice fields. The reason for this is that a small grassy hill separates these rice fields from the barbed wire and mine fields that is the DMZ. We got to try planting rice in pouring rain. Rice fields are muddy, wet, and cold. Stepping into one is interesting since your feet pass through several layers of mud, each with its own texture. That's especially interesting when you remember that there is an overwhelming smell of cow poo in the air. Planting rice is a repetitive, boring task and I do not envy the ladies that do it for a living. When you see older Korean ladies, a lot of the time they are hunched over at the waist, and this would be one of the reasons why. You spend the entire day bent over, planting rice in an unstable surface, sometimes with a baby strapped to your back. It's not a glamorous job. One thing we learned during this portion of the trip was that this rice is regarded as some of the best in the world. Its location in such a highly restricted, and consequently unpolluted, area of the world allows it to be some of the purest rice on Earth. We got a few bags of rice to bring home, but haven't tried it yet. We were paid for our hard 20 minutes of labor with mockoli (rice wine) and watermelon. After that, it was a trip to "Korea's Niagara Falls." I think the picture below says it all.
A relief made from melted bullets
A monument that is supposed to look like two arms in the air
Our army liaison and broken prayer bell
The rice paddy we would work in
South Korean guards making sure we didn't make a run for NK
A quick pose before getting to work
A little boy watches the guards watching us
This little hill is all that keeps you from a pretty dangerous stretch of land
One bag of official DMZ rice
Red dirt fields and Korean scarecrows
Korea's Niagara Falls.....maybe that's a bad angle
Nope, that's it
Needless to say, after that unparalleled spectacle of God's creation, we were more than ready to head back home and get a good night's sleep.
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