NorthKorea

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 out of the way of the bus. We kept getting shocked that a family wouldn't hurry and would barely not get hit. We soon concluded North Koreans don't have much experience with cars. The streets were nearly always empty. We nearly never stopped for traffic lights. We never hit traffic. The cars we saw were…

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 to shake hands but not all to converse yet. I think by this point no one knows everyone, though we all got to be friends by the end of the trip. Ingrid on the left, her boyfriend Neil, Joseph, Jordan, Gabriel, and John. Joseph and Jordan have planned the most, for about three years. We…

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 stay there. They built our hotel on an island. You can see a nine-hole golf course below, but you couldn't see it from the ground level. I'm not sure if it worked. The golf course seemed incongruous with my expectation of North Korea. Every morning we were there I heard industrial dredging-like sound coming from…

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip... If you read this blog regularly you know I don't find value in people telling others what they should consider right or wrong, which ethics discussions usually do. I try to avoid using judgmental or evaluative language except when the criteria for evaluating are clear. Talk about visiting North Korea and you'll find people want to talk about the rightness or wrongness of going. I can't say what's right or wrong for anyone else, but I can share how I worked things out for myself. If that helps you, I'm glad. If not, feel free to share your disagreement. I might learn something. The North Korean government presents itself as the best in the world. The rest of…

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip... The next most common question after how to get to North Korea and its legality is what it's like. This blog will cover the experience in depth. For now some overall conditions of touring North Korea. Later posts will cover the sites and experiences. This post covers the basics of how the tour goes. Limited choice The North Korean government gives you a limited choice in the places you can go, basically choosing from a list of a few dozen government-approved places. Want to go elsewhere? Not likely. If you read where others have gone, you'll hear the same short list almost each time and see pictures of the same places. Since almost no one knows what North…

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip... Mention you went to North Korea and you'll hear two questions more than any others: How do you get there and is it legal? With proper paperwork Americans can legally tour North Korea, according to the State Department, but it warns you you're taking serious risks, you just have no legal recourse from the U.S. government because the two countries have no diplomatic relations. How to get there, on the other hand, can be easy. I hear doing all the paperwork yourself is impossibly complex. On the other hand, letting Koryo Tours handle the paperwork, as we did, makes everything easy. All you have to do is show up in Beijing with a double entry visa to China,…