Cultural Awareness Day

Yesterday we had our cultural awareness day. This consisted of a morning session on local customs and courtesies, lunch at a local Korean restaurant, a visit to the the 2nd Infantry division museum on camp Red Cloud, and a visit to a DMZ observatory.
The customs and courtesies class was interesting based on the fact that some things are so different than what we are used to as Americans. For example, Koreans don't really talk during meals. This will prove to be difficult for me. Also, Koreans hand and receive objects to one another with tho hands (The right hand with the left hand underneath the right forearm). I could go on, but I think you have the idea.

The local restaurant was a typical Korean style "Steak House". It was a table with a huge pan of cooking Bulgolgi (Marinated Beef) along with community dishes of Kimchi (pickled cabbage and other vegetables. It's the staple of korea...it's eaten with every meal), rice, and mystery vegetables for everyone to eat from. It was pretty good!



The 2ID Museum was pretty cool but very brief because we were short on time.



Here's a picture of a random city




We ended up at the unification observatory. It's an observatory that you can see North Korea from. It's hard to make it out, but in the distance in the picture below is North Korea. You may be able to barely some buildings. These buildings were built as North Korean propaganda to give the appearance that they were making progress; however, no one ever lived in those buildings. It was strange to be that close to North Korea.



What's also interesting about being out in Korea is the language. I've learned some basic phrases but that's about it. What gets me though is the Hangul, or written Korean. It was kind of funny being in the Observatories museum because obviously nothing was in english. So...we just stood around staring at pictures with a bunch of hangul symbols. There were about 90 Americans in this museum all standing around pretending to be interested but having no idea what anything meant. Even things like the trash cans. There were three trash cans with different colors and symbols. I had no clue which one was for what, so I threw my trash away when no one was looking, crossing my fingers that it was the right now. I probably screwed up their recycling program.



The temperatures here are in the mid 30s with lows in the mid 20s. For those that have asked about flying, I won't start flying for at least another 2-3 weeks. It's still the same old same old here at camp Stanley.