Looks good.
Did anyone of you visited NK ? If possible, can you share the experience ?
Did anyone of you visited NK ? If possible, can you share the experience ?
When I went there, a few years ago, visitors were allowed to stay only in one hotel. Also, infamously, one of the presumed hotels is essentially a façade, which is not mentioned (but the hotel is in the cover!).
Since the population is poor, and there is little mobility across the country, I doubt that they have six hotels in a functional sense.
However, this a photography book, right? Well, they did an obscene amount of photoretouching (pretty much like all the modern photography); the saturation is cranked up to 11. I remember a couple of the locations depicted, and they were completely unremarkable in real life.
So, my suspicion is that this book is more of a "staged hotels of Pyongyang" rather than something substantial.
Regarding your question. IMO, it's worth visiting NK (which is Pyongyang, essentially, with brief tours outside the city) for no more than around three days. There's virtually nothing to see after that, especially considering that you must follow the plan.
What I find interesting in NK is to be present in an authoritarian regime. I can't say "to experience", because the experience itself is staged. But even knowing that, I find it interesting. It's also unsettling to know that you're in their hands.
Despite what they say, the atmosphere is not heavy. My theory about Otto Warmbier is that he got drunk and did something stupid. Imagine going to NK as being in a church; if you don't scream and misbehave, nothing happens. I can imagine, on large scale, people doing stupid things, and that likely will happen. But that's speculation on my part.
Definitely don't go with the Young Pioneer Tours (they were Warmbier's tour operator, and NK is not anymore in their destinations). They're a bunch of irresponsible, incompetent and dishonest people (I had my own misadventure with them). People like that should never be in charge of such delicate jobs.
edit: corrected the name of the travel agency
Also your critique of how it looks in real life is very interesting and very real. It’s like seeing the locations of movie sets as it’s being filmed or afterwards. It never has the same feel or atmosphere. So much of that can be careful crafted with selective visuals and editing.
It doesn’t make the end product any less interesting though. I love this sort of Soviet modernism in the photos.
It’s what socialist dream of for their perfectly planned states when everyone knows what it’s like underneath. No matter how badly it failed in real life the underlying ideas and ambitions are still interesting, even if it’s merely for historical value, entertainment, or inspiration. And the ideals can often still be important even if they didn’t work out at all in prior forms and methods on a wider scale.
The emotional value of design is too often undervalued compared to its practical value in real life. Much like romantic concepts in art vs pure functional realism. Both have their uses and value.
> Young Pioneer Tours are the leading travel operator to “destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from”.
However, I do have a "when in Rome" story from the US[2]:
I went to school in a large city, and my cheap student car gave me trouble on the freeway, so I pulled off into a very poor neighbourhood. I had the hood up and was poking around in the engine to diagnose, when I heard a gruff voice behind me: "Boy, you are wearing the wrong colour for this neighborhood."
Adrenalin dumped. It suddenly occurred to me that the existence of the "gang colour" concept, which up until then had always been an abstract thing mentioned on the news, might suddenly be of concrete importance.
I slowly stood up and turned around, to see a huge guy, dressed in a manner very much unlike people from my university.
... who then smiled (he'd probably caught the look on my face), adding, "... but I guess it doesn't count if your shirt has a collar" and walked away, laughing to himself.
[1] Rory Miller would call it the "drinking in strange bars" guideline.
[2] at that time, I think public nudity would have been more likely to get one in trouble in the US than in the DDR. In a recent trade deal with S'pore, the US managed to get them to legalise chewing gum: well, as long as it is for medicinal purposes only!
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMqAKw8vlWc (one of my countrymen failed to stand for this several years ago and had to get bailed out by our diplomatic service.)
Kind of strange to see such a large LED display running nothing but eyecatch and PSA's. JCDecaux or Clear Channel Outdoor would be using it in a much more efficient manner.
For what? Brainwashing people to buying another Coke? Sure they are better at that at least.
Interesting story behind that hotel going back 30+ years.
I always thought it looked like a place Darth Vader would call home.
Or do you mean you have a theory as to how he ended up in a vegetative state under their care?
It's not clear if the person depicted in the video is him. I personally think it's not.
Some think that they killed him purely to spite the USA government, which implies that they decided to kill an american and fabricate evidence. So, that's another theory, with different premises.
I don't agree with it. I think that:
- he did something stupid (e.g. got drunk and yelled something against the leader);
- they decided to punish him, but didn't have evidence;
- they fabricated evidence;
- they punished him.1. He committed a legitimate (by their laws) offense and was punished. The claimed offense (I think it was stealing a regime poster) was the sort of thing where it should be obvious that they have (by our standards) disproportionate enforcement on. He knew he was teasing the bull by trying it. 2. At some point in captivity, he had an actual health emergency. This could have been inadvertently triggered by abuse or the conditions, or it could have legitimately been something like an infection or food poisoning. As I recall, the autopsy didn't show obvious signs of abuse. 3. The health crisis may have been handled improperly, due to limited health care resources or just bad luck, and he ends up in a coma. 4. They toss him back in that state in a clunky attempt to both score political points and avoid the far greater blowback if he died in the DPRK.
There's very little for them to gain by having him die in their custody, and they aren't stupid about that fact. That makes me expect incompetence and bad luck more than outright malice.
https://www.voanews.com/usa/court-papers-hint-warmbiers-trea...
I wonder how dangerous would it be to visit there after posting practically any statement about NK on a public forum. Upon arrival, if they did their homework on every visitor, it's possible there might be some uncomfortable questions.
I can't prove that there weren't, say, hidden cameras, but based on the technological and economic level of the country, I strongly suspect that there wasn't any. For the same reason, I doubt that they have the resources to perform anything other than a basic investigation on incoming tourists.
It went as a ‘see it for myself’ experience, albeit on a guided tour across much of the country and about 7 or 8 hotels. I’ve not looked at this photo essay, but memories include a mud bath hotel, hotel staff opening up an Egypt themed disco for a dozen of us, and a missing hotel floor.
Although confined to a set tour and hotel grounds, we were free to mix with and chat with locals on site. The guides were somewhat oblivious that us tourists lived for those moments, not the target sites.
Experiences ranged from the heartwarming (boozy unscheduled picnic with locals), the creepy (mass children’s song performance), the worrying (military parade), the beautiful (flower show), the surreal (subway ride), the bizarre (innuendo filled cave tour), the thought provoking (locals appetite for iPod western music), the embarrassing (tour eating dog), and much more.
I’m very glad for the experience.
Although I haven’t clicked the photo link (I read HN for the comments), it’s made me consider posting my photos to a website.
Please do, I’d certainly be curious to see them.
It's like walking into 1984 the book. Nobody who visits believes we're seeing the country as people there live it. You go where they let you, though we did take a detour when a road was blocked and saw parts of Pyongyang outsiders don't get to which felt like seeing the back of a movie set where you see behind the facades. Everyone in the group wanted to take pictures but we all agreed not to for the sake of our guides.
Since I tend to look for similarities, not differences, I was more curious to see how people lived under such a different culture, so disconnected. My two biggest takeaways
1. A greater sense of empathy for all people for seeing how similar people were under the most disconnected culture I've come across
2. Culture shock hits you when you return, seeing things that used to seem normal from a new perspective. Seeing Times Square after seeing their giant statues of their semi-divine Great Leaders. I still can't shake seeing Times Square as a bigger sanctuary that we kneel to, representing a comparable submission, devotion, subjection, and permiation into our lives and minds.
[1] yes, yes, I know about youtube-dl, but I've been lazy lately.
Edit: https://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-half-baked-hel... sounds good to me, but then I'm someone who has witnessed that paying troublesome tenants to move out is much less hassle than evicting them.
Edit2: On further reflection, the troublesome tenant will remain a troublesome tenant, where this proposal suggests a former national cadre would become a relatively powerless exile.
History seems to say most who grab for the brass ring view the utility of being "top, or nearly top, dog" as far outweighing the disutility of the sword of damocles.
It was actually my most luxurious holiday. Usually I'm a very low-budget traveller, so having to stay in a 4 star hotel (Yanggakdo) in Pyongyang was luxurious. The Arirang mass games was also very impressive: a 400x50 pixel display, made of children.
We could talk for hours about NK labour camps in Siberia (I went to the entry gate for one of them and almost got arrested), NK refugees in China and South Korea (some of the happiest people I ever met), Liberty in North Korea movie screenings of Seoul Train, Crossing, The Hiding ... get in touch if you'd like to chat more about this fascinating country!
http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com hacked the border crossing, but that hole has almost certainly been secured since.
I've found a propaganda site which purports to be DPRK and is unabashedly old-style second world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738281
(Incidentally, YIL St. Benedict out Marx'ed Marx: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588118 footnote 2)