This is the ninth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here One of my creepiest experiences in North Korea was a tour of a primary school. Our bus pulled into an empty, cheerless concrete schoolyard, and we were marched up to the principal’s office. I had immediate flashbacks of all the times I’d spent in the office as a kid, and the string of suspensions I...
This is the eigth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here Any trip to Pyongyang involves extensive tours of the city. It’s North Korean’s showcase, a vast stage set carefully designed to promote the myth of the Fatherland and the success of Kim Il-Sung’s Juche philosophy. Our first stop was a house said to be the birthplace of Kim Il-Sung. It was a poor...
This is the sixth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here The International Friendship Hall is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen. It’s an enormous marble Korean-style building constructed to house all of the gifts given to Kim Il-Sung, from almost every country in the world. Many of these gifts were from heads of state (the most elaborate being...
This is the fifth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here After another horrid hotel breakfast we were taken to visit a Buddhist temple in the mountains. It was said to be very old, but detailed questioning revealed most of it to be a concrete reconstruction. According to the North Koreans, the original temple was destroyed by the “American imperialists”...
This is the fourth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here One day I took an overnight trip from the capital of Pyongyang. A field trip of sorts. It was the only time we were permitted to sleep someplace other than our hotel, locked down on an island in the city. We drove on a smooth, wide multilane “tourist highway” that begins in Pyongyang and ends at Mt...
A few more notes from my recent trip to Japan (and then we’ll get back to North Korea)… Today I’d like to talk about one of the coolest cities in the world, a place where I lived from 2000 to 2002. Tokyo is a vast urban sprawl that spreads to engulf neighbouring cities and towns faster every year. The current population of the metro area is approximately 28 million. It bears...
My apologies for the long delay since my last update. I’ve been in Japan for the past couple weeks and just returned home. We’ll get back to North Korea very soon. But first I’d like to share with you a few images from this last trip… Let’s begin with sumo. I got hooked on sumo while living in Tokyo between 2000 and 2002. As a martial artist the technical aspects of...
This is the first in a multi-part blog on North Korea… Many readers have asked about my time in North Korea. Why did I go? How did I get in? What was I thinking? I’ll start at the beginning. It was August 2001, a month before 9/11 changed the world forever. I was living and working in Tokyo. Summer vacation was coming up, and I planned to visit a friend in Indonesia. The problem is...
Surrealism supplanted reality the moment I landed in Pyongyang, North Korea. In front of the airport terminal, beneath an enormous painting of Kim Il-Sung, a long line of women in traditional dress chanted “Welcome Pyongyang!” as they pumped their fists in the air. At the airport I was paired with an “escort” who wouldn’t leave my side the entire time I was in the...
Half an hour by motorcycle outside of Phnom Penh. A peaceful spot by the riverside. A place where fat lazy bees buzzed, and where crickets sawed songs in the grass. A dirt pathway wound through this scene. I followed it until I met with the overgrown pit of an exhumed grave, its sides eroded like elderly gums or the caved-in face of a hobo. There were dozens of them, choked with stagnant...