Tuesday May 20th, 2025
Today was a very interesting day filled with an insight of what Koreans truly experience through their history and what they do today. We started by meeting this morning at nine to head an hour north to visit the DMZ. We first had an early lunch at a local restaurant where we had ‘military soup’ which was a nice spiced broth with hot dogs, sausage, spam, and ham, with lots of spring onions and veg. The soup was light yet filling and very yummy. We had our passports checked and got on a different tour bus to head to our first stop, the 3rd tunnel that was found by the South Koreans. The North Koreans have attempted to build 4 different tunnels, that we know of, and the third tunnel is open for visitors to pass through. We wore hard hats as the ceilings were very low and were able to walk through the tunnel looking through a hole towards the very end of the tunnel. There was a water fountain with water sources from a north Korean spring that we could fill our bottles up with. Our second stop was the observatory where we could look out onto North Korean soil but it was very foggy today so we could barely see 50 feet ahead of us. Our last stop was a small local village where we got ice cream and there was a small shop aimed at tourists to help build the local economy. The DMZ was very cool and interesting to see all the military and defense that is needed.
After the DMZ we made our way to the baseball stadium to watch a game. Dr. Yun got us all Korean fried chicken to eat during the game which we bought outside but were allowed to bring inside (something that would never be allowed in the US). The game was fun and the cheerleaders were really cute. Everyone would dance and cheer during their batting time, they would also stand the whole time their team was batting. There were many chants that everyone seemed to know by heart which was very sweet and nice. The food inside the stadium was also good and had a large variety and wasn’t as over priced as stadium food in America is. The game went into overtime and we had a 45 min metro ride back so we arrived back at the hotel just after 11pm. Today overall was a long day but filled with interesting and fun activities.
