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A trip to North Korea
The autor is Artemii Lebedev, one of the leading web-designers in Russia. He recently went on a trip to DPRK. You can read full story in Russian here: http://tema.ru/travel/choson-1/
I'll translate his comments briefly. On your arrival at the airport you need to leave your cellphone, no roaming service is avaliable but if you select an operator manually you get PRK 03 although I never saw a single person with a cell-phone. Laptops are allowed it seems that north koreans are not aware of cards that can make your laptop to work like a cellphone.  The only house where a foreigner will be ever allowed on his visit. It's a model-house of a model-farmworker of a model-collective farm. There is even something that looks like a computer made of components that are not even plugged together. Internet does not exist, only intranet is avalaible.  On your arrival you will be assigned to a guide and a driver that will constantly follow you. You can't leave the hotel on your own. The daily program consists of 2-3 visits to a landmark. In the hotel you can watch BBC,NTV (russian chan),and a couple of chinese channels, so you can't really complain about freedom of speech. The food is good, and you can't complain about that either. In a park he saw elder women picking up herbs, the guide said that it was for the rabbits, although it was clear that it was the kind of herb that the "owners of the rabbits" could eat.  Kiosk for locals, most of the time they sell lemonade, foreigners are given a plastic cup, locals get porcelain mugs, that are washed in a bucket of water after use.  Sometimes you see people selling some kind of a vegetable, that was taken next to a fruits and veggies store, they immediatly closed the door as they saw a tourist.  The plaster statues are clean and not broken apart. North Korea is a perfect reproduction of the year 1950.  Oil is almost inexistant, so most of the labor is manual.  |
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