I'm always fascinated to read about North Korea. I feel so incredibly bad for the people who live there, who either know how bad things are (and can't do anything about it) or don't know (and thus don't care). In some ways, the latter group is probably better off.

(A great book: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, about life in North Korea and what it's like to escape to the West.)

It's amazing to see what North Korea will do to keep its own citizens in the dark, and to try to make things look amazing to foreigners -- only to fail spectacularly.

The attempts to erase traces of the metro cars' German origins reminds me of the department stores I've read about in Pyongyang, in which people enter and exit without buying anything, only to return minutes later, in order to give foreigners the illusion of a great commercial success.

All countries engage in propaganda and patriotism to some degree, but North Korea really takes the cake here. I hope that its citizens will one day be able to gain more freedom and financial security, but that somehow seems unlikely in the near future.