Last Day Abroad! (6/23)

It was really hard to wrap my head around the fact that this grand adventure wasn't going to go on forever, that there would come a time after which the experiences would stop; I'd have to get on a plane and go back home and leave behind this incredible world of new places, histories, thoughts, experiences. I guess I'm thankful that that day arrived unannounced, that it didn't agonizingly creep up on me, but instead unceremoniously appeared.

I took it pretty easy on my last day in Korea. My only real excursion was a trip to the Korean War Memorial/Museum. Someone had recommended that we check it out to learn more after our visit to the DMZ, so a few of us went on our own. My favorite part was the actual memorial to the Korean war-- it was a globe split in half along the 38th parallel, with two "brothers," soldiers in military garb, embracing atop it, across the line. Very powerful.

Statue of two brothers

The rest of the memorial and museum was a bit too militaristic for my tastes. "What did you expect, going to a military history museum?!" one might ask. I don't know. I really don't know. But I do know that I was still really shaken up from visiting the Hiroshima memorial, so a lot of the museum's militarism seemed frustrating and retrogressive.

Another monument. Had a lot of really strange aggressive, masculine, and almost fascist aesthetics and themes that threw me off

The museum has an absurd amount of materiel

Look at all that machinery! Pretty intense

There were two particularly heavy moments in my visit to the museum. The first was seeing all the Korean youth climbing all over the military equipment, with smiles on their faces and lights in their eyes. I have no place to make any sort of judgments on Korean culture or parenting or anything of that sort, but from a humanistic perspective it saddened me to see war and militarism so normalized. I don't live in a divided country, though, and definitely have an extremely privileged/biased background as an American.

They're so young :/

The next moment was at the PKM-357 exhibit. This patrol boat had been involved in a skirmish with North Korea in 2002, and six of its crew were killed. The boat has been restored and now has massive red circles around each of the holes that were put through it in battle. People walk through it. I don't know how I feel about that.

Some of the many bullet holes in the boat

The rest of my time was spent wandering the museum itself, which was pretty interesting-- far less pressing or discomforting due to the historical distance between the artifacts and the present day.

One of Korea's famous turtle ships

Apparently Korean horses abused steroids

I basically spent the rest of the day chilling and reflecting, trying to soak up as much of the atmosphere I'd come to love as possible. I went back to the Art Space that had been so much fun the day before, and stuck around that oh-so-musical public square for a few more acts. Then, I headed back to my room to pack for our early departure the next morning.

A jazz group

Buddy was gettin' it on his melodica

And that, as anticlimactic as it may sound, was my last day in Korea.