DPRK II

We are met by our chief guide Pak, his apparent minder Li, our driver, one person who seems to watch the minder and our "group videographer." American groups are rarer than the gills on a camel. We board a good Japanese-built bus (comfortable but with typically little kitschy touches: mini-chandelier-like droppings above the windows) for the drive into the city, first through heavily cultivated rolling country, the first fresh greeens of Spring, a great number of flowering fruit trees....bucolic, pretty and welcoming. Lots of noise from the guides about this and that though no surprises.

We are told that we will be the Pak group becuase to call us the "American group" could conceivably cause hostility on the part of the locals. I doubt this but what do I know. Suddenly we are in lego land...but lego land with huge and at times obscene differences. Pyongyang looks like no other city in the world: the average person lives in apartments from 5 to 25 stories.....and judging by the balconies they are extremely spare and tiny. There are thousands, literally thousands, of such buildings to the visual horizon. They seem better built than the gruesome crumbling Soviet-style high rises of yore. At times the city seems irradiated: where ARE the people? THEN we see a line of about 1/2 mile long at tram and bus stops...all waiting, quietly, politely and there is something vaguely terrifying about the order.

There are the bumptous HUGE public buildings....usually with little bits of kitsch stuck here or there on them....great vast alienating squares (often with statues of the local legends but also of archers, figure skaters, animals...looking oddly like soap sculptures....on the bus often music plays...it is a combination of martial music and tinkly-sentimental ditties, often with female singers (or maybe they are castrati?) wailing forth.

There is the pyramidal 105 story unfinished hotel; the Juche Tower with a plastic flame on top.....there are two or three truly hideous squares; a giant arch of triumph (if one looks at the real history of the DPRK one would be hard pressed to find the triumph); the landscaping is often pretty especially in Spring.

THEN as a special treat we are taken to the "square of squares" something Disney and cecil B DeMille could hardly improve on: a bevy of martial statues and bas reliefs leading up to the 80 time larger than life SHINY brass monsterous statue of fearless leader Kim Il Sung. We buy flowers, stand in front of the statue, make a slight bow (to show our respect). I wonder then if the flowers aren't recycled to the flower seller....one will never know.....THEN to the hotel. The hotel is 47 stories and it has an apparently inert revolving restaurant on top. (My son, Tony, later confirmed it does indeed revolve- at a snail's pace of course.) It feels very late-Soviet. Among its amenities are a bowling alley, a casino (about as lively as a funeral home), several restaurants.

Most service staff here is Chinese (under some kind of arrangement with a businessman in Macao) was the DPRK does't relish having their citizens having intercourse with foreigners.,..and especially not Imperialists from America.

We go upstairs to our slightly bleek but absolutely ok rooms: two lilliputian beds, a bathroom with bathtowels rather the size of diapers, a tv (which astoundingly has BBC as an option!)....I am on the 22nd floor with a nice view of the river, the legoland beyond including the Juche Tower with the red plastic flame on top. Dinner is the first of meals in the DPRK which vary from vile to "I'm surprised that it is not vile"....beer is included....service is swift...condiments odd...some dishes we couldn't quite identify but that's our ignorance.

Something looked greatly like whale blubber with chocolate chips, another if bok choy in a sea of orange liquid which was piquant to the 3rd power...then there is pickled fish.....that night the bread was a jelly roll.

THEN it is time for the ARIRANG GAMES and these are so spectacular, so truly mind bending that I want to write a separate entry about them.