Hey everyone,
A brand new post for you to enjoy. To start off I'm still surviving and in the daily grind of teaching and as with any job some days are better than others. This past weekend Dave, Mika, and myself made our way north to Paju, an area larger than Seoul, where Alex lives and teaches. Paju is the last area of South Korea before the DMZ that separates North from South Korea. This past weekend was the 1st annual DMZ documentary film festival in Paju and after a relatively early night on Friday, we made our way to the film festival early Saturday morning. The first film we saw was a documentary called "Welcome to North Korea!," a Czech film about a group of Czech tourists who are allowed into North Korea on a sightseeing tour. It was a very unique film that allowed us to see what North Korea actually looks like and see how the Czech group responded, a unique experience given that most of the group lived in Czechoslovakia during its Communist period. It was interesting to see how the group was told that certain things weren't allowed like 300 mm camera lenses or camcorders but they were allowed to bring them into North Korea and use them once they were there. But, you could also see some of the stark realities of North Korea. For instance, tourists walk on one side of the street and locals walk on another side, with no interaction between the two. There are soldiers everywhere and potential secret police disguised as citizens around every corner. At the end of the movie, some in the group noted how sad it was to leave their tour guides, knowing they were going home to something better, while the tour guides, who slept in luxury hotels and ate well with the group, were going back to dire situations. Overall, it was a very interesting film. After the movie we walked around the festival tents, taking in all the free samples, making rice cake, and experiencing the Flugen, an area where sanitizing spray is misted on you like the cool misting fans at music festivals. The second film we saw was called "My Neighbor, My Killer," a documentary on the gacaca trial process in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide in 1994. I studied this genocide at university last year in my Politics of Human Rights course. The gacaca trials try to bring justice to villages by having open-air hearings with citizen-judges in an effort to bring truth and reconciliation to the victims and also ease the transition back into society for the perpetrators of the genocide. The trials didn't officially begin until 2005 and so far their success has been limited and it remains to be seen how effective they will be for Rwanda. After the Q & A session with the director, I found out that she knew one of my professors from Madison, who I had for International Studies and who usually teaches the Politics of Human Rights course, which was neat to find out.
The third film we saw was called "The Yes Men Fix the World." The Yes Men are a couple of political activists who infiltrate the world of big business by posing as fake members of different corporations like Dow Chemical, the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, Haliburton, etc... They pull these pranks to highlight how corporate greed is destroying the majority of the world. The humor in the film was a nice switch from the first two films, but ultimately, the outlook of the film wasn't too bright. We had a great day of movies and went back near Alex's place to grab a delicious meal of shabu-shabu, basically tons of veggies, thinly cut beef, and stew with noodles and rice, covering all the important bases.
Sunday morning we set out for the Unification Observatory, located right against the DMZ. It was very eerie peering through a set of binoculars into North Korea, or basically a model town the North Koreans set up a la Rock Ridge. It is very hard to describe the feelings you get when you look at North Korea and realize how close it is and yet how different it is from South Korea. The Observatory was a very well done building with many interesting artifacts from North Korea and some very interesting exhibits. After our time at the Observatory we headed south back into Seoul to hit the back end of the Kimchi Love Festival. The festival, which advertised 192 + varieties of kimchi did not disappoint. There was kimchi everywhere and lots of free samples (my favorite). Fine kimchi is similar to fine cheese and wine, it gets better with age, although there isn't anything quite as aged as 12 year old cheddar; the oldest kimchi we tried was 3 years old and had a very different taste from the other kimchi strands. They also had a gourmet kimchi creation competition, which we unfortunately missed the end of. Overall it was a very enjoyable weekend.
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