I am finally back in DC after my Korea trip. I had such a wonderful experience at this conference and was able to meet some amazing people!
Here is the link for the conference in case anyone is interested in applying for future events: http://www.hpair.org/
Anywhey, I was couch surfing while I was there with this wonderful guy who was kind and generous enough to let me sleep in his home for a week. I had a mattress on the floor and there was a screen door I could slide close for privacy. He lived like10-15 minutes away from the conference venue in Seoul, so it was very convenient. I had a bit of a rocky start coming, but fortunately the rest of my experiences were all amazing. When I arrived, I took a bus from the airport into Seoul and got off somewhere near my host's apartment. I still had to take a cab to his place so I flagged one down and shoved my luggage inside. Meanwhile, the traffic is pretty bad and cars were honking at us. As soon as I sat down, I tried telling my driver where I needed to go, but he couldn't understand me at all. Suddenly, he got out of the car and started yelling at another driver. They were screaming their lungs out at each other for a couple of minutes, and then my driver followed this other car around the corner, still screaming his head off. Then he came back and told me to get out. I was so confused and had no idea what was going on. To make matters worse, nobody understood me when I told them where I needed to go, and it was difficult to find someone on the street who spoke English. Finally, I came across two young professional types and they helped me out. They were the sweetest girls and got a cab for me and gave the driver directions to my host's apartment. So yeah, bit of a rough start, but everything went really smoothly after that.
That evening, my host took me out to look around the area. We took the nicest, most high tech subway I think I've ever been on in my life and then walked around Gangnam. Then we saw a guy in a cartoon cat suit and I HAD to take a picture with him. He was out promoting some restaurant or cafe, and my host thought it was a cat cafe, so we checked it out, and it was AWESOME. We payed like $8 for entry, which included a drink, and there were cats EVERYWHERE, just chillin. And we got to pet them and play with them. Super fun, right?
The next day was the pre-conference tour, and I went to the DMZ with a bunch of the other delegates. This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. On the bus ride there, we watched this really cool documentary about the Korean war. Okay, so I thought it was really cool, but everyone else fell asleep. Anywhey, our first stop was at this cultural museum where we saw a bunch of North Korean goods on display as well as old army stuff like tanks and planes. After that we had a Korean BBQ lunch and made our way to this crazy old tunnel that the North Koreans had dug and walked through it. Good thing we had helmets on, otherwise I would have been unconscious within an hour from banging my head against the ceiling so much. After we got back out of the tunnel we got to take pictures with a bunch of the ROK soldiers and after that we went to the border where all the barbed wire fences were. We had a military briefing and looked around some more and also wrote our well wishes on ribbons and tied them to the fences.
The conference itself was great. I was in the Asian Security panel so we had a lot of speakers talk about nuclear issues, terrorism, etc. I met some really great and interesting people and I hope I'll be able to keep in touch with many of them from now on :)
