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It quickly became apparent that while most tourists had done their homework, a few treated the trip as a spur-of-the-moment whimsy, like spring break crossed with Alcatraz: somewhere you could get drunk cheap, harass local girls, or shove your camera into the faces of locals like they were zoo animals.

One couple seemed shocked that Korea was full of Korean food; others complained that meals were slow or that their bathtubs were stained, apparently unaware that they were living better than the vast majority of a country that didn't speak the language they were ordering their drinks in. Most tourists were great! But some maintained a sense of superiority, as though it was a profound observation to point out that Korean technology was dated, or that an obvious falsehood told at a museum was, indeed, false. It was uncomfortable, like watching people lucky enough to have rich parents mock poor people for not working hard enough, but on a national scale.

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The occasional flouting of rules (on our first night, one tourist got drunk, tried to wander into a hotel kitchen, then tried to leave the hotel grounds entirely) led to a lot of jokes about the potential to be arrested or killed, and comments from the rule breakers that they weren't afraid of the consequences. They didn't mention the possibility that it would be a local getting in trouble for them.

A couple people were convinced that a car that seemed to be following us was full of secret government minders who were watching our watchers (it turned out to be a private tour that was visiting some of the same sites), and also thought that two clearly different people we had seen throughout the day were the same secret policewoman masquerading as a waitress. One tourist insisted that polite questions from our Korean guides were part of a plot to spy on us, as though they were going to cap off their 14-hour days by rushing back to their rooms and furtively noting that Albert from Marseille is an accountant who likes field hockey, the imperialist swine.