Roadtrip....Gwangju

Two weeks ago I went down to Gwangju to visit my friend Martin and his girlfriend Priya. They met me at Gwangju Station and we headed straight to the nearest information booth. We knew there was a museum dedicated to the Gwangju massacre but didn't know it's name in Korean. Turns out neither did this worker. She did have some places that were dedicated to the events of 1980 and the biggest was the Cemetery on the edge of town honouring the dead.

Once we arrived the first thing you see is a huge tower that looked a lot like something from the Lord of the Rings. Behind this were the cemetery plots of the dead. I never know if I should be taking pictures here and the place was barren of people so it was hard to gage what other people were doing.

From this tower we went into a silent room where pictures of the dead sat along the tiers of stairs that made up the wall. In the centre of the room, most of the faces were of young men who were killed or died of their injuries after the protests (the government forbade the hospitals from treating the wounded). I liked that this tomb had room in it where those lucky enough to have lived past the uprising but did take part can also be honoured.

After we silently absorbed all this we made our way to the museum. I didn't take any pictures inside there but highly recommend the place. It had news footage of the events and lots of information for those who haven't heard about this before. The part I liked best was that the government had given itself medals over their handling of the protests. Not thinking ahead, when the military government fell the next government used this list of winners to track down all those responsible.