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OCD: Candy Colored

By Ophelia Chong
November 6, 2009
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seoul

The view from my hotel room in Seoul is filled with palaces and office buildings. If you minus the palaces, I could be anywhere in Asia. Taxis make a blur on the roadways, people criss cross across the streets, the smell of charcoal and noodles fill the air, I feel at home and I miss home.

In the shopping area of Myoung-dong, there is a department store with a food floor to end all food floors. The Lotte Department store is the Neiman Marcus of Korea. I walked in and my mouth started gaping like a fish out of water. Where to go first? Cosmetics? Korea has the best cosmetics, and being Chinese it was made for my skin type. I quickly made a dent in the cosmetics, bags full, but I wasn't done yet.

Now to the Lower Level, I take the escalator and I smell it first. A swirling tantalizing cloud of drool inducing smells. Noodles, mochis (sweet rice cakes), sushi, waffles, bread, pastries, barbeque and more. I was in the candy store of my dreams. Food everywhere. There was endless aisles of candy colored foods, I could pick and choose whatever I wanted. I was struck dumb, where to start?

A few miles from where I was standing is the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It is 155 miles long and approximately 2.5 miles and the most armed border in the world. Across that border that cuts Korea in half is a population that can't even imagine what I was looking at. North Korea is a country that has pushed their might behind an army, and taken from the plates of their people to feed that military. North Korea suffered with the changes in Russian (collapse of Soviet Russia)and China (monetary), their farming culture suffered a massive failure in 1995-96, expanding to a wide spread famine by 1996-99. An estimated 600,000 died of starvation (other sources have estimates from 200,000 to 3.5 million).

Here I was standing in a food court 30 miles south of the DMZ, watching people throw uneaten food into the trash. The clatter of food trays followed me as I left the store and looked up and the colors began to fade to match the grey skies outside, the same sky on both sides of the border.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Ice Cream Mochi, Lotte Department Store, Food Level

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