About going to North Korea... it's really easy and pretty safe... you just book a trip with a travel agency that specializes in trips to North Korea, such as Koryo Tours (the oldest and probably best one there is).
You pretty much need to go on a group tour... when you arrive in North Korea, you're given three North Korean guides that follow you everywhere and tell you exactly where to go... you have to follow their program to the letter, so basically it's a propaganda tour.
When there is no program, you're stuck in your hotel, not allowed to leave.
I don't mind that too much though... to be honest I'd probably not want to wander around North Korea on my own anyway.
A little bit about what to expect on a trip like this -
One of the first things you do is go see the two gigantic bronze statues of the two previous leaders.
There used to be only one there, of the first leader (built while he was alive), but after Kim Jong Il died, they redid the one of Kim Il Sung and added one of Kim Jong Il next to it.
You have to buy some flowers there and put at the feet of the statues, and bow to them... it's obligatory.
Another stop is the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, this huge and extremely expensive 'mausoleum' that Kim Jong Il built when his father died, for him to rest in... now Kim Jong Il is in there too.
I've never really seen the inside of this place, so that will be interesting - it's strictly forbidden to take photos in there, you pretty much go through airport like security on the way in.
Inside, you get to look at the corpses of the two previous leaders, preserved in glass cases (and you have to bow to all four sides of the caskets, I've heard).
Another stop on the tour will be the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
This is where the armistice agreement was signed in 1953... they never signed a peace treaty (I'm sure all of you know this stuff already, just writing a little bit about each place here).
I've heard this is the most militarized area on the planet.
Apparently, visiting the DMZ from the North side is a lot more relaxed than when visiting from the South... in the South, they tell you how dangerous it is, etc etc, while there's little of that when going there from the North.
The international Friendship Exhibition is another place that will be interesting to visit... you're not allowed to film or take pictures inside there either, but it's less strict than the mausoleum, so I've seen a few clips from inside there on Youtube.
The place is basically another shrine to the leaders, like the mausoleum also is... it's a gigantic building (over 150 rooms covering a total area of between 28,000 and 70,000 square metres) filled with gifts presented to the two previous leaders, by various foreign dignitaries.
According to Wikipedia, the current estimates of how many gifts the exhibition holds vary between 60,000 and 220,000.
There seems to be a lot of pretty odd things in there, from the little I've seen.
I actually found a list of some of the gifts on Wikipedia, so here are some of them -
- A bear's head from former Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu
- A metal horseman and ornate chess boards from former Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi
- A crocodile skin suitcase from former Cuban leader Fidel Castro
- A gem-encrusted silver sword and a miniature mosque in mother of pearl, given by former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
- An antique gramophone from China's first premier Zhou Enlai and an Armored Train car from chairman Mao Zedong (entire wings are dedicated to gifts from the country)
- An ivory lion from Tanzania, gold cigarette case from Yugoslavia, bronze USSR tank from East Germany, silver chopsticks from Mongolia
- A basketball signed by Michael Jordan given by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
- A bullet-proof limousine from former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
- A VHS copy of Space Jam
- A copy of Bootsy Collins' 1994 album Back in the Day: The Best of Bootsy
We'd also be visiting Mt. Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula.
This mountain has a lot of history to it, and is considered a 'sacred' place in North Korea.
According to North Korean propaganda, Kim Il Sung organized the resistance against the Japanese there, and it was also the birthplace of Kim Jong Il.
That's not true though, obviously they picked that location to have been his birthplace due to the significance of the area in North Korea. In reality, Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union.
Last but certainly not least (of the things I mention here, obviously there is more, these are highlights), there are the Arirang Mass Games that they perform yearly in Pyongyang.
It's a HUGE performance, with acrobatics, dancing, etc, etc... telling a (highly propagandized version of) the history of the country, and things like that.
I've watched a full performance online, I just wish I knew Korean so I could get a bit more of what's going on.
In any case, it's an impressive performance, with a total of about 100 000 people performing!
Twenty thousand of those are schoolchildren, sitting at the opposite side of the stadium, holding up these books that contain just a tiny piece of a huge picture.
Combined, they create this enormous image that changes when they all flip to another page in their books.
The pictures change to match what's going on in the performance.
You can see the giant picture in the background in this image, formed by all those people holding books -
Here are some other sights in Pyongyang, built to commemorate the Korean resistance to Japan from 1925 to 1945.
The monument was built to honor and glorify President Kim Il Sung's role in the military resistance for Korean Independence. Inaugurated on the occasion of his 70th birthday, each of its 25,500 blocks of finely-dressed white granite represents a day of his life up to that point.
It is 10 meter taller than the one in Paris, which they like to point out (at least I've heard it pointed out by guides more than once, when watching NK videos on Youtube and other places).
The Monument to the Party Founding, a giant 50 meter high monument consisting of three components - a hammer, sickle and writing brush, which represent the worker, the peasant and the intellectual.
North Korea added the writing brush to the well known hammer and sickle.
The Mangyongdae Children's Palace (or Mangyongdae School Children's Palace) in Pyongyang is a public facility in North Korea where children are engaged in extra-curricular activities, such as learning music, foreign languages, computing skills and doing sports. (from Wikipedia)
In one North Korea documentary I saw, the female guide there told the people in the group that the building was built to look like a mother stretching out her arms, to embrace her children.
So those are some highlights from a trip to North Korea... I really hope we'll end up going... I'm always a bit pessimistic about things like these but ah well, I'll see how it goes :)
Anyway, if I'm lucky enough to end up going, I hope I'm even more lucky and get this guy for one of the guides, Kim Won Ik -
Out of all the various guides I've seen in all the videos I've seen, this guy seems to be the most friendly and cool out of all of them (some of the ones I've seen are downright rude, one guide was bragging about having broken the camera of tourist that he thought took too many pictures - however, it's quite possible this could have been because he was afraid of getting in trouble himself, for letting the tourist take so many photos... I don't know).
There's actually a little interview with Kim Won Ik here (it's where I got the picture from :p) -
http://koryogroup.com/blog/?p=1323
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