How do you say “Skeet Skeet Skeet” in Korean?I’M BACK AND STILL ALIVE; it’s too bad, because the story about spending time in a North Korean gulag would be a great one for the bars, right? Though I fight the urge to knock Mr. Bush - whether you’re conservative or liberal, his presidency has been disastrous, and has only gotten worse during the whole New Orleans washed away/Head of FEMA was an unqualified moron/New supreme court nominee is entirely unqualified Fall of 05. But I digress. His government is at worst much, much better than that of mafioso Kim Jong-il, pictured above (a photo of a photo, btw; no one ever sees him these days).

Let me preface my remarks: North Korea is a barbaric state. It has been under the autarkic yoke of Kim il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-il since 1948. Hundreds of thousands have spent time in prison camps and untold millions have perished because of government-caused famines. Freedom of movement, access to food and clean water, freedom of speech and freedom of religion remain strictly abridged. Penalties for trying to escape North Korea are up to 10 years in prison. Even international aid workers see their movement restricted, and believe that donated food often fails to reach its intended village, but rather is diverted for army use. The nation spends a bigger percentage of GDP on defense than any country in the world. As recently as 1990, a 2km wide tunnel, with rail tracks and a truck route, was found dug beneath the DMZ.

The areas foreigners, myself included, are allowed to see are quite limited. We are not even allowed to walk out the door of a hotel without a minder, and minders will not take you anywhere that has not been preapproved. Foreign media and entertainment (DVDs, etc.) of any kind are prohibited. There is no internet, no mobile phone service for Koreans, and it is very difficult for a Korean to leave the DPRK. What I saw in Korea, then, is not at all representative of the state of life for the majority of mainly rural Koreans. The fact that my comments do not include human rights problems does not mean they are nonexistent.

So onward to the trip. I arrived in Beijing Thursday night, and swung over to my old part of town (in Xicheng) to eat some good Xinjiang food (mmm, chaomianpianr and nang, good stuff). The next morning, I went to the N. Korea briefing; these two British guys had a whole bar set up in the “rich Soviet” theme, vodka all round. They spent Friday processing visas while I had the afternoon off, so I swung down to my old office at the Kerry Center to say hi. I ended up running into a guy there from Boston, and his house has satellite, which means I had a chance to watch the Sox-Yankees game. Not too bad. We stopped off at a party the Marines were holding at the Embassy (MSG are the Marines who guard embassies abroad) - a few people asked if I was in the corps; I’d just gotten a haircut, and anyone above 5′10″/165 seems pretty imposing over there in Cathay, right?

Early Saturday morning, us 14 Americans met at Beijing airport and got ready for the flight out. Not many people have flown on Air Koryo, huh? Actually, it was a decent flight - the food was certainly better than standard American Airlines fare. None of us had been in North Korea proper, and I’m sure I’m one of the few Americans who has been to the North but not the South.

From above, the country looks heavily farmed and really, really unpolluted. Asia is notorious for its polluted cities; Beijing has a thick layer of smog at all times, and other cities (Wuhan and Changsha, to name a few) are even worse. N Korea has no such problem, though not by choice. They’re simply living in essentially a preindustrial era. I’m told some of the cities other than Pyongyang are quite smoggy (say Chongjin), but I couldn’t verify first-hand.

There were about 100 foreign tourists (not including South Koreans) in Seoul when I was there, and us 14 Americans were the first people other than aid workers and govt. diplomats to enter the Hermit Kingdom since 2002. Pretty much every foreigner stayed at the same hotel, and every day we all went to the same places (though staggered an hour or so) and ate at the same restaurants. I question whether the restaurants are even open on the other days. Among the foreigners there last weekend were Charles “World’s Most Traveled Man” Veley (I’m working on a book about him and some other crazy travelers) and Cui Jian, the Bruce Springsteen of China and my favorite Chinese musician. We actually ran into him for the first time at a rest stop.

The first night we went to the Arirang Festival (the main reason they’d let us in the country). Every few years, the DPRK holds these “mass games” to a) impress foreigners and b) continue indoctrinating locals in the Juche (joo-chay) ideology. 100000 (not a typo) performers put on an acrobatic display for another 75000 or so in the stands. Our seats were maybe 10 rows back, pretty solid. Most impressive was the backdrop; about one-third of the stadium, opposite our seats, was filled with 20000 schoolkids all holding books with pages of different colors. On cue (exactly on cue) they would change the color of their book and form a gigantic image. It’s tough to explain without video (if you’re over my place, ask to see it, I snuck some out) but it’s incredibly impressive. If the Commies are good at anything, it’s making masses of people do things on cue, right? I have a telephoto image of the kids below so you can see what I mean.

Our hotel was called the Koryo Hotel; it was relatively modern, though nothing special. There are only two hotels that service foreigners in Pyongyang (as well as a few others in major tourist sites like Mt. Kumgang and Kaesong). The bar downstairs was solid, however, and we spent pretty much every night down there with the Danes and the Brits. There’s not exactly what you would call “nightlife” in Pyongyang (the city is eerily dark and quiet), and even if there were, we weren’t allowed to leave the hotel.

Pyongyang looks like a standard, Le Corbusier style modern city. Massive concrete blocks and wide streets stretch across the city bisected by the Daedong River. There are very few cars on the streets - we ran into about 10 at the busiest intersection, but only saw one other car on the 15km drive to the airport on the way out. Monumental architecture, including an Arch of Triumph (bigger than the one in Paris), a 22 meter statue of Kim il-Sung, and tons of Soviet Realism are everywhere (I like Soviet realism, if not the message, so I didn’t mind it). There are exactly three advertisements in the whole city, put up in 2004 for Hyundai cars. I saw one of them. Aside from that, the only signs are USSR-style communist propaganda. It is *everywhere*. Korean socialism focuses on an idea called Juche, usually translated as self-reliance, so posters reflect that ideology.

There are two notable items on the skyline. First is the Radio Tower, with a restaurant 200m up that we ate at. Second is the enormous Ryugyong Hotel. Costruction for this 1035 ft. tall pyramid hotel began in 1987, and at the time it would have been the world’s largest hotel. Of course, it’s ridiculous for the world’s largest hotel to be built in Pyongyang, and N Korea ran out of money 2 years later. The building is just an unstable concrete shell now, with a crane still sitting on top. You can see it from all over the city though.

The next day, we took a trip down the DMZ. The most heavily fortified border in the world, the DMZ is a 4km no-man’s-land between the two Koreas. At Panmunjon, there is a Joint Security Area where negotiations are held. The negotiating room is half in South Korea and half in North Korea (in the picture below, the negotiating rooms are the blue buildings, and the large building in the background is in South Korea with S. Korean military in front). Normally, tours from both the South and the North get to visit the negotiating room, but the N Koreans made up a bullshit excuse (”the Americans locked the door from the inside and are doing maintenance”). This “maintenance”, coincidentally, was to be finished on the 17th; after the 17th, Americans will no longer be able to get N Korean visas.

Saturday night, we got permission to head over to the other hotel, which is on an island 800 meters away from any other building. There is a golf course on the island, amazingly (a chip-and-putt though). We got there at 10pm and there are no lights, so it was too late for a round, but I did fork over 3 Euro for the change to go to the driving range. You get to drive balls into the Taedong River, pretty sweet. The best part about it was that, for the first time, there was no minder around! I “went into the bar”, quickly left, made my way to the driving range, and told the girl there I wanted to hit some balls. You can see the hotel’s island in the Google Earth image below (btw, Google Earth is god damn amazing); go up above the building to the right of the golf course, and you’ll see a small blue strip next to the river, behind a small hill. That’s the driving range tee. Definitely hard to find for the average government snoop, especially at 1030pm.

The golf pro was a 24-year old girl named Hong Hyun Min. I know about 15 words in Korean and she knew not much more than than in English, but we managed to have a bit of conversation. Hyun Min was really, really good at golf. I, on the other hand, am not. Five shots in, I cracked a drive, and the entire head of the driver went flying into the river. These were not exactly top-of-the-line clubs. Whenever anyone else would walk near, Hyun Min got really quiet, but once they left, she was cool again. I told her I was American and she thought it was cool! Definitely one (of two, more later) of the few rad people I met in the DPRK. That’s her below cracking a drive.

Sunday was “Anti-American Propaganda Day.” N Korea has a very, very strange sense of history; it’s essentially made up. Unified Silla (based in the South) first unified the Korean Peninsula in the 7th century, but in North Korea, the Koryo Empire (begun 918) is thought to be the first to unify the nation. My North Korean guides had no idea that Koryo rulers were vassals of the Mongols for a century or so. North Koreans believe that the Japanese capitulated to Kim il-Sung in September 1945, and not to a certain nuclear-bomb wielding, swing-dancing state to the East. North Koreans are taught that the United States started the Korean war with an unprovoked attack. In 3 days in North Korea, including time at the Korean War Museum (the “Fatherland Liberation War Museum”, as it were), I did not once hear any mention of a certain group of Chinese volunteers. Here in the Real World, we know that China joined the Korean War, armed with superior MIG-15 fighters, two and a half months after the war started; at the time, North Korea troops were pushed back to the border and the war was nearly over. The North Koreans do not know this.

“Who stops the peace in Korea?” propoganda posterAside from stops at a ton of monuments, we had two cool detours on the final day - visiting a school and riding the Metro. The school was Kim il-Sung’s school, and it was the one all foreigners visit, so of course it was pretty nice. I “got lost” and wandered the halls a bit. There must be some cracks in the N. Korean wall, as I saw a few kids wearing their hats backward with baggy pants, thugged-out. Where did they learn that? The school also put on a “musical performance” for us, with three synths, a drum set, a bass, a guitar and six singers who alternated turns. The music was technically very good, but (at best) it was like Korean John Denver. Yeah, that bad. The only up note was the drummer. She was an 11 year-old girl, and every time she got to drum, she got really into it and looked wicked happy that she could play. She was also very, very, very good. Too bad I didn’t have a copy of “School of Rock” to give her, right? Anyway, we took photos with them afterward, and she was clearly different from the others. They all did the fake smile, wave goodbye for two minutes kind of thing, but she really looked pretty sad when she saw we were leaving. I wanted to take her home! She would have been my adopted N. Korean little sister, hehe. Really, if the revolution begins, you gotta watch out for this girl.

We also stopped at the Metro. Pyongyang, if you can believe it, has two metro lines. The metro was actually pretty nice, as you can see below. Following the Moscow model (probably the world’s best subway), North Korean subway stations are monumental inside. The escalator down must have been 100 meters! I actually made a real North Korean laugh - we were taking pictures and I counted “Hana (one), Dul (two), Daseot (five)…aaah, aniyo, Set (ah, no, three!)” when taking a pic. Hey, it’s tough to make a joke when you only know 15 words.

Overall Impressions? North Korea is essentially a theocracy. I heard the explanation that all North Koreans are priests, Kim Jong-il is the Pope and Kim il-Sung is Jesus. This strikes me as pretty accurate. Everyone in the country was wearing a Kim il-Sung pin over their heart at all times. The country is also massively poor. Back in China, I was told at the US Embassy that the ration in the North Korean countryside is 2 potatoes per person per day, and a Chinese from the border province (Jilin) said that poor peasants can buy a N Korean wife for 50 gongjin (110 lbs.) of rice, which is like 30 bucks worth, retail. It’s quite sad, and hopefully the reunification that Kim Jong-il wants so much comes along soon so the bum can finally be tossed from office.

I’ve posted seven new pictures to the right, all from the North Korea trip.