War Memorial

Hello everyone. For those keeping count, we just finished 7 months and now only have 5 months left. I don't know it's felt for you, but I fell like it's blown by and Ali goes back and forth between feeling like 7 weeks and 7 years.

After living here this long we've developed a weekend balance between exploring everywhere and holding onto some money. We just had Chuseok in Jeju and next weekend is in Busan, so this weekend feel into the non-adventurous category, but nonetheless, we did get up to some stuff worth noting.

There's a group called "English Cafe" that is organized by a few Korean teachers to get the foreign public teachers together. They had organized 2 trips I went on before (mountain climbing and skating, which both featured English, but neither featured a cafe) and both were fun. For Saturday, they organized a trip to "The War Memorial of Korea." Despite what images that title gives you, it is not just a big statue with flowers around it (although they do have that). It is in fact a large museum that shows artifacts and exhibitions all detailing Korea's war history, which goes far beyond the Korean war. Ali and I had wanted to go here for awhile because we had heard good things about it so Ali came along on the trip too.

We met up with everyone on the subway and again, I discovered new foreigners in Uijeongbu. It seems like there's over a 100 now. They provided lunch for us, which was nice of them since Ali isn't technically part of the group.

Once we got in the museum, we were only with the group for a short time, since everyone wanders a museum at different paces. Our first part of the museum was an outside gallery showing all the countries and names of people who died from that country in the Korean war. I didn't realize how much of the world was involved in the Korean war. The Korean war was South Korea, U.S.A, Canada, Columbia, England, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ethiopia, Australia, Philippines, Turkey, Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Thailand, Greece, Belguim and South Africa vs. North Korea, China, Russia. If you can tell yet, I'm into museums and history.


Inside, we walked through various rooms that had interesting artifacts to look at from weapons to costumes to models of what the kingdoms looked like through the centuries. Korea's history is filled with fending off invasions from Mongolia, China and Japan. It's amazing that they still exist given all the attempts to invade.

The museum was also very up-to-date since it had a display looking at the sinking of the South Korean ship from March of this year.

We arrived at 3:30 and stayed until 6:00. Unfortunately, we were slow enough that we missed the War Experience room. Somehow, it recreates the atmosphere of being on the battlefield through sound, smell and scenery. We have read lots of great things about it but it closed at 5. Might have to go back next time we're in town.

Outside, we took pictures with all the weapons, tank and plane displays. It's refreshing to not see "Do not touch" signs (or at least not being able to read the ones that say that in Korean).
Ali showing her other side.

Me getting far away from Ali.



In other news, it's business as usual for me and Ali has been putting in lots of work hours this week for speech contests. If you know anyone coming to Korea, tell them to try to get a public teaching job.

We'll let you know how the Busan (or Pusan, depending on romanization) film festival goes next weekend.

Hope you're all well,
Ali and Jesse