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When we were finished with lunch, Mr. Kim cleaned up [Image 73] while the rest of us visited and played with Ryan [Image 74, Image 75]. Ryan's foster parents wanted to take us on a sightseeing trip to the North/South demilitarized zone (DMZ), but Ms. Yang had to get back to work and was unable to come with us. Mr. Kim gave her money for a cab and she said goodbye, put her shoes on, and left. Now we were left to communicate with our Korean hosts with no translator! However, it wasn't nearly as difficult as we had feared. With our few Korean phrases and Mr. Kim's few words of English, and with a good deal of pointing and gesturing, our deep reservoir of goodwill and common love for Ryan were enough to make us understand each other. Deborah was also an enormous help in this regard, because although she doesn't speak Korean, she speaks several other langages and is much more well-versed in linguistics than we are. She had also learned to read Hangul phonetically in preparation for our trip and was much more comfortable using an English-to-Korean phrasebook than we were. Before we left for the DMZ, Tom got Mr. Kim and Mrs. Choi to pose for a portrait with Ryan [Image 76] on their living room couch.
It wasn't a long drive to the DMZ from their home, probably only about 20 minutes, and soon we found ourselves at a place called the Unification Observatory [LINK]. The Observatory is a large stone and glass building atop Mount Odu, on the banks where the Han and Imjin Rivers converge, right at the border and overlooking North Korea across the water [Image 77]. It was here and in our later excursion with Joe's foster parents (see Chapter 13) that we came to understand just how deep is the wound in the Korean psyche caused by the partition of the Korean peninsula [Image 78]. Every Korean that we talked to about it fervently hopes that one day, North Korea and South Korea will become one peaceful nation. Of course, the fact that North Korea is the most insular, paranoid, heavily armed Stalinist dictatorship in the world isn't going to make reunification easy. The whole time we were at the DMZ, we could hear North Korean propaganda being blared across the border by giant loudspeakers. In contrast to the openness, democracy, and abundance evident in the South, the North seems like a poor and truly forbidding place, even from a several-kilometer distance. We had an interesting and educational trip to the DMZ, and Joe loved running around the grounds [Image 80], but we were glad to return to the comfort of Seoul [Image 81]. Mr. Kim and Mrs. Choi drove us back to our hotel, and we thanked them for their warm hospitality and delightful company. We kissed Ryan goodbye, sending him back home with his foster parents for the last time.
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