More themes to expect from this blog on North Korea… Seeing their lack of freedom leads you to value yours more — and that you have to maintain it Compare your freedom to a North Korean’s. Does your greater freedom bring you reward and happiness? If you consider freedom essential to happiness and you aren’t much happier than most North Koreans what are you doing wrong? What are you misunderstanding?[…] Keep reading →

Only having written a few posts, I’ve already hit some of the major themes that visiting North Korea raised in me. I’ll touch on them here to clarify them since I expect they’ll continue to show up in future posts. Seeing others reveals things about yourself and your culture — and the more different they are, the deeper they reveal about you and your world. We take many parts of[…] Keep reading →

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip… More pictures. Click on them for larger views. Approaching our first bona-fide tourist site, the Arch of Reunification. North Korea claims as one of its greatest goals and sources of victimhood is the division of the two Koreas. I don’t sense from South Koreans a great desire to reunify, but I don’t claim any deep insight or knowledge of either culture. Approaching the[…] Keep reading →

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip… More pictures. Click on them for larger views. Our first morning driving out from the hotel. We experienced driving in North Korea for the first time the night before, coming in from the airport. We landed in the early evening, but night had fallen by the time we reached the city. With almost no streetlights the city was dark. People kept narrowly getting[…] Keep reading →

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip… More pictures. Click on them for larger views. Today’s pictures are more about our group than North Korea, per se, but they do feature some of the first North Koreans ever throwing frisbees (actually Discrafts, for those who know the difference). The morning after we arrived, waiting to get in the buses to go south to the Demilitarized Zone. We’ve all met enough[…] Keep reading →

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip… Now let’s see some pictures. Click on them for larger views. The view from our hotel window. The sky was bluer than this picture shows, contrasting with the overcast and polluted skies of Beijing and Shanghai, the other two places I visited on this trip. Nearly all the pictures I’ve seen online of Pyongyang include something about our hotel. It seems all visitors[…] Keep reading →

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip… Here are some basic observations I saw in North Korea without embellishment or analysis. When I looked out my hotel room the first night we arrived to see about half the city, because of their dearth of electrical power I could count the number of cars driving: two. Buildings outside Pyongyang were bunker-like concrete slabs, many unfinished. Many people appeared to live in[…] Keep reading →

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip… One of this trip’s major themes was the difference between expectations and experiences; also recognizing that expectations — Americans have wild expectations of North Korea — say things about yourself, not them. Experiences say something about the interaction between others and yourself. Americans, myself included, know little about North Korea and North Koreans. Our expectations tell us about what gets past the filters[…] Keep reading →

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip… Since returning I’ve found people incredibly interested in North Korea. For better or worse, many people ask what human rights issues I saw there, if any. People far more experienced than I have investigated and reported on North Korea beyond what I could observe. If you want to learn about their experiences, you can find them. See below for a short bibliography. I[…] Keep reading →