I believe a king lived here and that the building dates from around 1400, but I don’t remember. Still, it’s one of the few historical buildings they have or architectural references to a leadership other than the Kims. Sorry I don’t remember the details (perhaps a reader who knows can remind me), but you start tuning out the guides and the stories glorifying the Kims and their regime sometimes, even[…] Keep reading →

More images of North Korean monuments… I think this sphere and orbit building was part of a technology museum on the road to and from the airport. We didn’t enter it though we went near it. I suspect it’s not in active uses. We saw this church, one of the few religious things outside of the government’s state sponsored religion. I don’t know if it has active serviced or is[…] Keep reading →

North Korea likes to do things big and nationalistic. Here are some images of their bigger monuments. Above is the (in)famous Ryugyong non-Hotel, started in 1987 for completion in 1989 but never finished. When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea had insufficient resources to finish the building, which was costing 2% of the country’s GDP at the time. I’ve read that using too-low-quality concrete and crooked elevator shafts make the[…] Keep reading →

The pictures below don’t even approach showing the almost unbelievable performance ability of North Korean children. Joseph’s pictures showcase their talent better. But no images can show the professionalism, dedication, and raw talent these kids have. The pictures below are from the Children’s Palace, which trains children to perform and create art and puts on incredible performances. After their performance last time, my travel groupmate who was starting a school[…] Keep reading →

Non-North Koreans had a field day with the videos of people crying they saw after Kim Jong-Il’s death last year. People saw it as over-the-top and probably forced at the pain of punishment. I wrote on that crying before. On this trip, on April 15 — the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth — we got to visit the newly unveiled colossal statue of Kim Jong-Il next to his[…] Keep reading →

A detour brought us to something few non-North Koreans, and probably few North Koreans, get to see — the other side of the tracks in Pyongang. April 15 was the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, something like July 4, 1776 in the United States. Amid the hubbub, they detoured our bus from whatever our route was supposed to be to a driving along some dilapidated[…] Keep reading →

We toured a museum of the subway system there. Here are the brief notes I took: Room after room of staged photo after staged photo of Kim Il Sung smiling, giving no information on engineering or planning or contribution from anyone but him… where he sat, when he visited, but no details on what he said. Nothing about what we would call the project. That museum was just like most[…] Keep reading →

Who would expect beautiful beaches in North Korea? Visiting that far north in April, we didn’t find warm sunny beaches, but the Earth is beautiful and it’s hard to hide that. Some of the beachfront hotels looks nice, almost Mediterranean, from afar. Up close you saw the hotels couldn’t have been seriously maintained in decades. One hotel had zero hot water. We had to heat water by dropping a heating[…] Keep reading →

I doubt many people would expect to see much natural beauty in North Korea. I was surprised to see a lot once we got out of Pyongyang. You could only call most of the land stark. Little of it was arable. I don’t claim to be an experienced photographer — see Joseph’s blog for that quality of picture — but I saw some great stuff. My pictures don’t do the[…] Keep reading →