North Korea - Part 1

Praise be to Dear Leader, Kim Il Sung, President of the DPRK, and to Generals Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un…

It all began on the eve of Chinese New Year; Beijing was empty - no one walking down the sidewalks, no bicyclists speeding the opposite way down the street, no taxis deliberately not picking up foreigners, hell, not even buses could be found. The air was still polluted, go figure, but 20 brave adventurers embarked on a life-changing journey to one of the most isolated places on earth - Terminal 2, Beijing Capital Airport. Here is where the story begins.


Anyone who has ever traveled by air knows the grueling process of checking-in to your flight; i.e., long lines, people fidgeting trying to find their confirmation code, and of course, overweight luggage. I was standing in line noticing the North Koreans around me - all wearing the same dark, bland clothing, dark skin, and little red pins on the jackets. To my left was a much more interesting ordeal - a new definition of overweight baggage - a 60-in flat screen HDTV; and behind that guy, another man who checked in no fewer than 4 pieces of luggage, not a single one under 30kg (66 lb.). Air Koryo, the DPRK's only airline, has automatically topped all other US carriers in the checked baggage allowance department.

Courtesy of The New York Times.

Since commodities of all kinds are hard to come by in DPRK, people traveling back "home" buy as much crap as they possibly can to bring back with them, mainly, cigarettes and booze from duty free shops. Ok, I get it, no big deal. What IS a big deal though is when one person brings six bags on the plane, can't find a space for them, so just piles them up…..in the Emergency Exit row. I still can't believe I saw this, but it is 100% accurate. I am not sure of Air Koryo's safety record (according to Skytrax, of the 681 airlines in the world, Air Koryo is rated dead LAST), but frankly, I don't want to know.

Fifty exhilarating minutes on the taxiway thanks to Beijing's wonderful air quality and "high" visibility of no more than one mile, we were off. The plane is Russian built - the old Soviet era ones were recently banned from landing in Beijing. Nevertheless, I figured it would be a short flight, after all, it's about 90 min wheel-up to wheel-down from Beijing to Seoul. Nope, I was wrong. The plane never flew over water, rather, hugged the coast line all the way to Pyongyang for two and a half hours; and bonus, the in-flight movie (no headset optional, so we HAVE to listen) was a cheesy Korean war film with karate and shootings that frankly didn't quite make any sense. Imagine watching the cheesiest 80's combat movies, and take away all aspects of a storyline, and this is what that was. But, it is PATRIOTIC and hails the triumph of the Korean people against the American Imperialist forces and the puppet government of South Korea. 

At least there are no lines.

When we arrived in Pyongyang, the airport was a single building roughly half the size of a high-school gymnasium. It was one big room with plain cement walls, dimly lit, and very, very cold. Everyone in the airport was wearing dark colors - either black, brown, or gray. My first impression took me straight back to a book my grandmother used to read me about a world where everything was the same; people dressed the same way, acted the same way, and no one ever did anything different, thus making the world a bleak and boring place. Well, this was not boring; it was surreal. I got through customs rather quickly, and in the knick of time because the moment I cleared everything, the power went out. This was the first of many outages at random times we would experience.

Our first glance of the DPRK was on the road to Pyongyang. It was very bleak, and there were almost no other cars on the road (a welcome relief from Beijing's nightmarish roads). We saw many people walking around aimlessly while some were riding bikes. There were large numbers of "soldiers" (unarmed) marching about, and we discovered they were actually school-aged boys and girls. The buildings we passed were all grossly under "code" by western standards; some were crumbling apart, and all appeared to have only ever been painted once with no sign of any attempts to fix them up properly. None had any kind of unique style or architecture; they were all the same - plain, concrete block buildings. Their surroundings were equally miserable, with no sign of any landscaping or sub-structures, as though they were just built on flat ground with no real foundation. All the rooms appeared dark, or only had a faint amount of light. We later realized that electricity is scarce and often unreliable, and most people only have a single light in any given room, with a low voltage be it that.

Left: Kim Il Sung and Right: Kim Jong Il

As we made our way through the city en route to the hotel, we stopped adjacent the first (and only) department store in Pyongyang, which foreigners are not permitted to enter or otherwise approach. There was a huge square overlooked by a small hill adorned with the first large "Kimmorials" of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il. Behind them were the newest and most modern high-rises in Pyongyang that were lit up at night albeit not very well or impressive, again, by western standards, but surely a delight and point of pride for the North Koreans. Glancing back to the department store, it appeared to be about as stocked as a Kmart in the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel: not much stuff to choose from and nothing anybody actually wants. 

We arrived at our hotel as snow started falling. It is located on a small island in the middle of the Taedong River that divides Pyongyang. The hotel mainly serves foreigners (the few that actually come here) and was absolutely full of surprises. For starters, the elevators would stop randomly on the way to the 40th floor where our rooms were, and when we finally reached our floor, it was completely dark minus one small light at end of the hallway. We might as well have walked onto the set of The Shinning. Rooms were nothing impressive except the fact they each had a new flatscreen tv with a whopping 6 channels to choose from, the only english language one being BBC World News. 




Downstairs in the lobby was a brewery that makes a pretty decent beer - we drank it every night we were there. We ate dinner in the revolving restaurant on the top floor and the decor seemed to have been unchanged since the 70's; it made VMI look like a Country Club (I didn't think that was possible). There are two basements, a Chinese basement with a casino and a Korean basement that has a couple of pubs with ping pong, billiards, a bowling alley, and a swimming pool/spa. We tried playing billiards with some locals, but they wanted nothing to do with us. The only nice one was the barmaid, and all she did was smile. No english.

A night of heavy drinking rounded out the day after an exhaustive effort literally to fly two hours away - it took the whole day by time we reached our hotel.