technically inside North Korea

Just found this photo while scrounging through the hard drive. June 2007, I stopped over in Korea on the way back from Japan to Egypt.

That conference room on the border is the furthest inside North Korea a U.S. citizen can get, other than those canned camping trips to the one mountain whose name I’ve forgotten (and I didn’t have time to try it).

There’s a border painted down the middle of the room, and I’m across the border, maybe 7 meters deep into North Korea. That’s a South Korean soldier guarding me. Technically, the North Koreans could break through the door and grab me and throw me into prison for life with hard labor as a trespasser, which is why the South Korean soldiers lock the doors before anyone can enter.

That’s a U.N. badge I’m wearing, plus an earpiece so that they can shout “Get out!” or something if a squad of North Koreans charges toward the conference room. It may sound paranoid, but weird things do happen there. An American soldier was hacked to death with an axe by the North Koreans in around 1974 during an argument over the cutting down of a tree near the border.

By the way, Seoul is what I thought Tokyo would be– a neon mega-city packed closely together. Tokyo was completely unlike what I thought. There’s no real center. Tokyo is like 6 or 7 medium-sized cities placed close together and linked by rail. You never quite feel like you’re in the very center of Tokyo. But in Seoul, there are places where you can feel like you’re in the true heart of things.