There is certainly a tracker on my Instagram regarding what I’m posting and when. When I go into my “Discover” tab, all I seem to see now are posts that others are uploading to Instagram of Korea. Of course, I am enticed by gorgeous photos all the things we ran out of time to see: the Gamcheon Village, a cultural village (or really, a slum that’s been cleaned up) in Busan that in many ways resembles the colorful favelas of Brazil; the Haedong Yonggunsa temple, one of the few temples I’ve read about that actually sits along the sea; the Jangsan mountain.

The funny thing is that it doesn’t matter how long you spend in any one place, but you’ll never have enough time to see it all. I’ve spent the last eight years living here in New York, yet I still haven’t visited the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, or the Bronx outside of the Yankee Stadium and Little Italy, among other things that would be amazing to visit. In San Francisco, where I lived for my first 18 years, I hadn’t even seen Alcatraz or Muir Woods until two years ago; I still haven’t visited Yosemite, which is so embarrassing since I’ve seen so many other national parks that are less famous throughout the U.S. and abroad. The more I travel, the more I realize I don’t know about the world, but the more I want to learn and see.

I’ve been using sunblock on my face since around age 11 in an attempt to a) prevent too much tanning and of course burning and b) prevent premature aging. Granted, I was never a white-skinned Asian to begin with given that my mom is part Vietnamese, giving me more of an olive-tan natural hue than a white hue. But I also never wanted to be white-skinned, either. In America, people are obsessed with tanning; it’s a compliment when someone tells another that, “You look tan!” Tanned skin is healthy skin here, which is glowing. White skin is perceived as ghost-like and unhealthy. These people are often called “pasty.”

It’s so amusing how different it is in Asia every time I go, how white skin is considered the holy grail. Women carry parasols to block out the harmful UV rays and oftentimes in China would wear loose long-sleeved shirts to protect their precious skin. In Korea, I’ve noticed women applying white powder on their faces from their little compacts. If you go into cosmetic and skincare stores, the foundation and compact shades rarely get any darker than my own skin tone. I overheard someone, a white American woman on our DMZ tour, say that she really wanted to buy a cushion compact, but at all the stores she visited in Myeongdong, the shades were all very light in their limited range; None were as dark as her own skin (she was medium-toned, hardly dark at all).

Several times when I walked into cosmetics stores, the assistants assumed I was interested in whitening products. Each time they asked this of me, I smiled and politely said no, I’m not interested in whitening. I don’t even think my skin is capable of turning lighter, even if I stayed out of the sun 365 days a year!

Another funny thing: on sunscreen bottles in Seoul, the label oftentimes advises that you should stay out of the sun as much as possible even after application. No sunscreen bottle here in the U.S. says that.

We took a tour to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and Joint Security Area (JSA) today to get the closest we’ll come anytime soon to North Korea. After having read a few articles about how awful the lives were of people who live in the north (one particular account written up in the New Yorker about nine years ago still is emblazoned in my mind), I wondered if we’d be able to get any glimpse of life of the north side from the DMZ area. Just its name is so ironic since it’s probably one of the most militarized zones in the entire world.

We did get a glimpse — a fake glimpse. When walking to one open area, one of the U.S. army guides pointed to a little village which they found out, after some intense telescoping, is actually fake: the buildings are hollowed; the doors painted on, and the lights that turn on and off operated by a timer. We can hear the North Korean propaganda blazing loudly via loudspeakers while on the south side. And of course, North Korea is hanging their flag on a pole that is 525 feet high, trying to outdo and create a “flag pole war” with South Korea, who has their flag hanging from a pole 323 feet high. This all seems pretty petty and childish… until you hear about all the millions of deaths that came as a result of this war and all the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans who have tried to defect to China, South Korea, Russia, and elsewhere in the region to escape the North Korean dictatorship.

The part of the tour for me that was the most chilling (literally, I could feel my little hairs going up on my arms) was when we were learning about all the infiltration tunnels the North Koreans built in a planned attempt to invade Seoul from underground. We were allowed to tour the third infiltration tunnel up to a certain point, and then we had to turn back. Four tunnels have been discovered, but the South Korean government believes there could be twenty more and are still searching for them.

The idea that a country that broke away could have so much hate to build these massive and incredibly long tunnels to invade their neighbor and likely annihilate a great chunk of their people made me feel so sad and scared for a moment. There are people who really do think like this, and that’s how absurd and terrorizing events like the droppings of the atomic bombs in Japan, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 happened. Innocent people dying for… nothing, people having their lives taken away in seconds and being completely unaware of it — all of that is so terrifying — or is it for nothing? For the people committing these acts, it’s all really in the name of power. Power and control are what drives people.