Last week, a member of our local UE network shared a clickbait-looking video of an abandoned amusement park in a far corner of the country. It was titled "Korea's Abandoned Theme Park: What's inside is truly shocking..." and on the surface it had all the markings of a typical video, like we would have seen five years ago. Then I opened it, and immediately started making plans.
1. Preparing for the trip.
2. My cats disapproved of the plan.
3. Fantasia is an amusement park located next to a major Buddhist temple said to host some of Buddha's remains (which a lot of temples brag about). It had been one of the two main amusement parks of the region, before the other one closed. This one seems to have closed in 2020.
4. The park was surrounded on many sides by large parking lots. For whatever reason, there were always locals cutting through the parking lots on their way somewhere, just a constant stream of people cutting corners, trying to get around the thing as fast as possible. They were never out of sight.
5. Inside, there was a sort of Main Street USA layout greeting us.
6. A Hello Kitty store.
7. There was also a castle, but this one was supposedly Dracula's.
8. Ninja turtle ride.
9. This scares me.
10. I think I counted three roller coasters. This is the largest park I've ever explored.
11.
12. Inside a haunted spaceship.
13. Confronted by a knockoff stormtrooper.
14. Next we visited Dracula's castle.
15.
16. Lots of dinosaurs.
17. There was a small zoo in one corner of the park. All of the animals had long since been moved out.
18. Except for the tiger.
19. She was calm and seemed well-fed, until my lens hood accidentally tapped the glass. Then she got up and started pacing back and forth.
20. The glass was covered with dirty paw prints, except for some sections at nose height, which she had maybe touched her nose on, or licked, or breathed on.
21. In one of the nose zones.
22. Her name is HoSoon apparently, and she's a Bengal tiger, not Siberian which had once been native to this area.
23. Up on the other side of that ridge behind the cage was a public road. Occasionally we would see a car go by or hear people's voices. They might not have known they were only a few meters away from a lonely tiger.
She soon went to the back of the cage and started meowing sadly. I hadn't known tigers can meow, but they can. It didn't sound too different from my cats when they feel lonely.
Tomorrow I'm going to team up with some reporters and try to get definitive answers on this situation.
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