Actually I met some wonderful people there who tragically have to live under that government and I feel quite a close connection with them, even tho I only sent 5 days there. I certainly would not support “nuking” any country. Once you have been someplace, it is much easier to see them as real people rather than just a “target”.
It is very 1984-like. There are no shops really - and zero advertising… lots of slogans though. It’s an alternate universe.
Wrong thread, dude. How about opening one in the Pit if you want to express your views favoring genocide?
Meanwhile, thanks to the OP. I’m interested in rail subjects in general, the more obscure the better, and I guess the Pyongyang metro is about as obscure as they come.
One odd aspect of the metro is the station names are not related to the geographical location of the station. Hong Kong’s metro has stations like Central and Causeway Bay, Prague’s has Muzeum etc.
In Pyongyang the station names are things like Victory and Revolution. The subway felt most like the one in Tbilisi or Tashkent, a bit dark, but nicely done stations. Each car of the train has a picture of both Kim il Sung and Kim Jong Il at the front of the car. News broadcasts are played over loudspeakers in the stations.
We were only allowed to ride between two stations but spent perhaps 20 minutes on the platforms watching trains go by and taking pictures.
I’ve heard rumours that the metro doesn’t actually work on a daily basis; the short section that visitors are permitted to see is a sort of Potemkin village and is only made to operate for their benefit.
Given the lack of other transportation, this would seem highly unlikely. Pyongyang is the special city, the prize. They have to have their government functionaries and little people able to get to work there, if nowhere else.
I doubt that is true. The buses and trams (they have Czech trams - same as the older ones in Prague) are very crowded and when driving around the city, the metro stations we passed had people moving in and out. When we were in the system several thousand people where using it. I highly doubt that this could be “arranged” to be as perfect as would occur in reality.
Perhaps all the stations don’t operate, but on the whole I think it is a very real part of the public transport in the city. There is no other way to get around really. North Koreans don’t have cars much… about like an American owning an airplane… it happens but is quite rare. And there are almost no bicycles… too much freedom of mobility it seems.
Well…I was being somewhat facetious. You’re correct, the North Koreans themselves aren’t to blame, and Pyongyang has some amazing architecture that should be preserved for after the regime finally topples. (God only knows how many generations that will take…)
Having said that, if Kim’s successor ever decides to launch a nuclear attack on Seoul or Tokyo or even the western U.S. – nobody would blame us for a retaliatory strike.
Nobody would blame us.
Oh sure they will. Those same people who blame the US for everything will be right there, demanding that the USA show “restraint” and negotiate instead of striking back.
blah blah politics blah
I want to know how much Desert Nomad was able to interact with the North Korean people. I understand you go with escorts whenever you are out anywhere, but does one ever get to interact with anybody, even like a waitress? Aside from that, I imagine westerners don’t garner stares but are probably ignored for the most part.
How about weird displays of phony well-being? I saw on the Vice guide to North Korea, when the dude was eating in an empty banquet room, all these servers were setting plates and buffet lines with food that was probably exclusively for show. I imagine the Arirang thing is the biggest for show thing ever made.
How about the other people on the tour? Were they like you, unconventional tourists with guts, or were they anti-Americans on pilgrimage?
How preachy did the anti-American shpeal get? As critical as I may be, I’d still feel like they were trying to provoke me sometimes.
Also, what in the hell does one do in Sudan?
We were able to interact with the hotel staff (the hotel is a 47-story tower on an island in the river). We also had conversations with various museum guides and military at the DMZ.
We were able to spend an hour or so at a big public park and speak to a few random people (this was the best opportunity to meet “real” people). The level of English is not high but we found one woman that when told one of us was from California, was able to converse in Spanish. 
Most people on the tour had been everywhere else on holiday (Afghanistan, Yemen, Congo etc). About half of us had been living outside the US for a number of years (myself included).
The anti-American stuff was all in good jest - they were a bit embarrassed, but we were genuinely interested. At the amusement park we asked to see the kids game where they throw fake grenades at cutouts of American soldiers (they told us it existed) but then they said it was embarrassing for them.
On Sudan:
Sudan was amazing. Lots of Egyptian style ruins including Meroe (where were were able to camp right next to the pyramids as nobody else was around).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meroë
We flew into Khartoum, and the three of us then met up with the truck and a hired driver to head north (we went as far as about 100km south of the Egyptian border). There are lots of great little villages in the shadows of ancient temples (old Dongala and Soleb for example) and on the Nile one can see old British steamers and old railway stuff in Atbarra. A few nights we camped wild in the Sahara… just pulled of the road and drove 4 miles or so into the desert… at night we were more then 100 miles from the nearest lightbulb and the stars were indescribable… you could read by starlight.
Sudan is definitely in my top 5 most rewarding trips.
Buttonholing the man or woman in the street in Pyongyang almost certainly isn’t doing them any favors. From what I’ve read, they would almost certainly be expecting a visit from the NK equivalent of the KGB soon afterward.
When you went to NK, were you allowed to take your mobile phone into the country? If not, did you check it at the border and they gave it back to you later, or were you advised in advance and simply didn’t take it?
(I’d really hate to have my iPhone confiscated and never returned…)
All phones, GPS, radios etc. possessed by the group are collected by customs at the point of entry, and sealed in a customs bag. You get them back after you have cleared customs and immigration when leaving (even if you arrive by plane and depart by train). You can bring a laptop (to download a camera for example), but there is no internet available anywhere in the country.
You can however send an email from the business center in the hotel. You have to dictate it to them and they will type it. If you get a reply, they will print it and deliver it to your room. We left our phones in Beijing at the travel company offices - same with the laptop.
I’m laughing, but that is so fucked up. Thanks for posting about all this, Desert Nomad, it’s very interesting.
I’ll chime in with what is perhap’s Thailand’s weirdest incident with North Korea. Twelve years ago there was an odd incident involving a North Korean diplomat and his family. He, his wife and 20-year-old son lived outside the embassy compound in an apartment here in Bangkok. The embassy somehow got wind of the fact that they were planning to defect and so kidnapped them from their apartment! They tried spiriting them away overland to the the Lao capital of Vientiane, which is just across the Mekong River from our Nong Khai province. Presumably, the plan was to fly them back to Pyongyang from Vientiane.
I say “presumably” because their plan was foiled when one of the cars in the convoy blew a tire on the highway to the border and crashed. The family was rescued by Thai authorities. North Korea tried to say the diplomat had embezzled tens of millions of US dollars that had been earmarked for the outstanding rice bill, and that was why he and his family were being “recalled.” Then a bizarre twist: The 20-year-old son denounced his parents, who he said was forcing him to defect against his will. The last I heard, the parents did settle in the West, and the son is back in North Korea.
You can see something about the aftermath of this incident here.
Moderator note
This is extremely inappropriate. Do not compare a country’s population with the termites in your attic in this forum again.
No warning issued.
For the Straight Dope,
Spectre of Pithecanthropus
A few other notes:
There are not many good options for medical care. There is a UN doctor in a real emergency, but your only real option is to go back to China by air (and some days there are no flights).
Our hotel got BBC but it is not available outside the hotel and we were told the rooms where the guides stay do not have it (even though they live in Pyongyang, they stay in the hotel with you).
You are not allowed to use North Korean money. You can buy some as a souvenir (at a rate about 1000 times worse than the real black market rate), but at the hotel shop they only take Chinese Yuan or Euro. Chinese is easiest because they have small denominations.
They have devalued the currency since I was there but at the time 1 Euro would get you one ride on the metro at the “official rate” or 1000 rides at the real rate. Locals we were told earn about 5 Euros a month, but have all their food, housing, utilities, school, medical etc paid for by the government. The only thing to use money on is public transport and a few rare Western goods that find their way in. I found a can of 7-Up from Singapore.
One interesting site is the International Friendship Exhibition. This is a huge facility (hundreds of rooms) built into a mountain like NORAD. Inside are all the diplomatic gifts from world leaders to Kim il Sung and his son. There are (for example): a stuffed crocodile holding a tray of drinks from the Sandanistas, a CNN paperweight (from the people of the USA), a basketball signed by Michael Jordan (from Madeline Albright’s visit), an armored car from Stalin. The CNN paperweight and all the others will survive any nuclear attack. They also have pictures of one or both Kims with Qadaffi, Castro, Yassir Arafat and other world leaders.
It is worth visiting if only for the total weirdness of the place.
So, Desert Nomad, if you check back in. . . What kind of procedures did you have to go thru to get a visa. From what little I’ve read and heard about it, it seems like a bureaucratic nightmare, which may or may not be successful.
Interesting. Apparently there is at least one mobile-phone operator in the country, KoryoLink, with over 69 000 subscribers. It’s a joint venture between Orascom, the Egyptian telecom conglomerate, and the NK Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. I was semi-aware of this, because the same Egyptian conglomerate has part-ownership of a network in Canada.
No North Korean operator is listed at the GSM World roaming site. I guess they don’t roam (what a surprise).
I would assume that the subscribers are mostly government people.
I saw it in the Vice Guide to North Korea(well, what they let him film of it). They presented it to him as proof that the world acknowledges Kim Song Il and Kim Jong Il as amazing geniuses and the greatest people of all time.
It was weird. You can watch it here.