Untie! 4

Most of my friend's stories about Japan were pretty good. He's been teaching English over there since college, and I guess he's got a different perspective on things now that he's made a new life for himself in a foreign land. For instance, he says that Americans are fat and loud, and that Japanese girls are very subdued. He's had a couple of Japanese girlfriends so he knows all about that. The last one just broke up with him not too long ago. I tried talking to him about her but I couldn't pronounce her name. So I just let him talk about her. She was already in a lot of his stories anyway.

One of his best stories didn't have anything to do with Japan. It was about Korea. He took a trip there last summer, I think. Anyway, one of the places he got to visit in Korea was the 38th Parallel, the border between North and South Korea. He said the South Koreans don't actually run the demilitarized zone--the Americans do. So his tour guide was an American named Hernandez. He said Hernandez couldn't answer many questions, but he showed some slides and told this story about something called the Paul Bunyon incident. The Paul Bunyon incident was something that happened during the cold war, where American soldiers cut down trees in the DMZ so they could stare better at the North Koreans. That's pretty much all anyone does in the DMZ--stare at Koreans. The South Koreans stand in Tae Kwon Do stances and stare, in order to intimidate the North. They're kind of like the Royal Guard in Great Britain. You can take their picture and climb all over them but they won't budge. Anyway, the Americans were cutting down these trees so everyone could get a better look at the North. Then the North told them to knock it off, but the Americans didn't. So the North took a bunch of axes and hacked down some American soldiers, and that's what history has catalogued under the Paul Bunyon incident. Hernandez had some black and white slides of it and everything. It was a pretty good story, we both agreed.

Another thing that was interesting about his tour was that he had to dress up so the North Koreans couldn't take pictures and use it as propaganda, saying that South Korea was poor. Also there were many tunnels underground where the North tried to invade the South, even though the North says the South tried to invade them. The South has all these markings showing where the tunneling blasts came from. Then he told me about how a friend of his actually went to North Korea once and said it wasn't that bad. I mean, it wasn't as bad as you would think, although it's poor. His friend said the kids there were nice and he played some games with them and nobody hassled him. I don't know what he was doing there, and my friend didn't know either.