Answer of Korea

Drilling Propaganda

A scene I captured in Pyongyang (North Korea). You’ll see women ordered to drill a propaganda song and praising the their leaders. Notice the propaganda car standing outside the picture and the voice of some functionary barking orders at the performers.

Subway in Pyongyang

[category pyongyang 2008, north korea 2009]

Here are some pictures you don’t find on the internet often… I’ve forgotten, what that particular metro station was called, but here are some pictures of it. It was very dark, since there were only a few energy-saving light-
bulbs to lit the entire station. At the end, you could see another mural of Kim-Il-Sung. The trains seemed to be old metro coaches from Berlin. Inside, it was very crowded, very hot, no ventilation, dark and the train went very very slowly through the tunnels.
ABOVE: What they want you to see…
BELOW: What they don’t want you to see.

Beautiful Sites of North Korea

Just to show, it isn’t all grim here. North Korea has beautiful sites in the whole country. Click on any picture to expand it.

actual progress on the Ryugyong Hotel

Just to put it out there, some new pictures from the Ryugyong Hotel, taken about 2 weeks ago from the SW corner.

Construction in North Korea

First, let’s look across the Yalu River to see how construction is done in Dandong right at the waterfront. You’ll see clean concrete, construction lifts and bamboo grids with green nets.

Let’s now go back to North Korea and see how construction is done here:

First, the material to build with has to be taken from riverbeds or quarries.

The stones are then sorted and classed by size.

In the next step, they’re broken to smaller fragments. A drum-like machine is depicted in the above photo on the left. The stones are put in there with giant bowling size iron balls to crush the material. The crushed stones are then used to heavily stretch cement to form rudimentary bricks.

Those bricks are used to build most of the structure…

…while real concrete and steel are used to build the necessary skeleton. Lack of proper tools and knowledge reveals a nasty finish.

Here’s an example of construction at the Ryugyong Hotel. You’ll see in the lower right corner the mounting brackets for the glass facade.

After the building is roughly finished, the rough spots are being covered with plaster, to paint it later on.

Click on the photo to enlarge. Some rudimentary construction outside Sinujiu. Instead of carts to transport material, they use two-man wooden stretcher like thing with one open end on one side to quickly poor stuff on the next pile.

Click on the photo to enlarge. Building a concrete road right outside Sinujiu.

DMZ, Panmunjon, Kaesong and a really beautiful country

We went to the utmost south of North Korea: the border town Panmunjon and the next big city Kaesong. A long drive over an endless straight highway, built for absolutely NO traffic and passing by one of the most beautiful mountain ranges i’ve ever seen. Along the entire trip, i’ve only seen mountains, which could have been sculpted by any artist.

Then we arrived in Panmunjon. Hordes of Chinese People, staying there on their holiday, while North Korea received a big time visit from China today in the capital. All over the place, just before the DMZ started, about 150 tourists waited to be let through to the actual border.
You could see the tank barricades, which, in case of invasion, would be dropped to the road by detonating charges along the road.

So every vehicle got it’s soldier. One of them was the official tourist guide too and took us to all the different sites, where the cease-fire was negotiated, where it was signed and to the houses right ON the border, where some negotiations were held. I would have loved to also see South Korean soldiers and some American soldiers, but they hid themselves. There were no tourists today on the south side. But what I did notice was all the cameras mounted on either side of border, staring at each other. The South had more of them.

So the soldier/guide came up and asked, if and what questioned I had. I had some… How has he been now in the army, what rank do border posts have at Panmunjon and are they specially selected… Have there been any incidences, when somebody ran from the north to the south or from the south to the north… Turns out, he was five years in the army, the rank of the border posts are normal foot soldiers, who really really believe in the system. And in 1983, there had been a “sowjet” student who fled from the north to the south, running across the line. The incidence started, when North Korean soldiers came running after him and crossed to the south, too. He didn’t know, what happened afterwards and neither of what became of that sowjet student.

On the way back to where we started, I noticed that he had only been answering our questions. So I asked him, if HE had any questions to foreigners like me. He took a moment to think about it. Obviously he took it very seriously. He asked, what the opinion was, on North Korea pursuing their nuclear weapons program. And he heard as answer, that it’s not just an internal nor bilateral thing, but that it concerns the entire world, because the effects of a nuclear weapon reaches the entire world. We started a nice little discussion on what to do. So my obvious answer was to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons and research of any kind. That would lead to trust in the long run and would help to integrate North Korea into the world. He had then doubts about integration. So I explained to him, that countries growing together and integrating would mean the build-up of trust. And to answer a common “fear” here in the north, I told him, integrating countries does NOT mean losing its respective individuality and sovereignty. The European Union after WWII was a perfect example. Nobody wants to attack North Korea. It’s for peace.
By that time, we reached the last check point. We thanked each other for our talk and he seemed authentically happy about our small discussion, despite him being a very devout North Korean soldier who believes in the system and that there’s supposedly a threat from “imperialist” America. He seemed very smart and kind. I made NK propaganda responsible for that paranoia. …so… We didn’t reach any conclusion, but the important thing was that we talked. He listened, he talked… to a foreigner. And we shook hands.

So I went to Kaesong to see the city. Obviously much smaller than Pyongyang but still built in the socialist chic. But people smile and wave back, when you smile and wave at them. They greet you back and they laugh with you. That doesn’t mean, they haven’t any hardships, on the contrary, they’re especially stricken with a hard life. But something seems to keep them going and I’m not talking about government propaganda nor the smile of Kim Il Sung. Maybe it’s hope.

take nr. 2: some more pictures.

drying corn (yellow stuff) and peppers (red stuff)

workers doing something with the corn

construction

market somewhere on the way to Dandong

washing clothes in the river, in a fairly big town -> no water tab?

more little private stands, scattered all over

Dandong (China), seen from North Korea

Sinujiu, with a poster of the “100 Day Campaign” to make the extra effort, followed immediatly by another 150 Day Campaign to inspire another great effort. NK isn’t doing well.

By the way, here’s a light smog map of north korea I found in google, or what China let me find through Google. The map is inverted. You’ll see Beijing and Seoul clearly.

Dandong -> Pyongyang: no comments

Sinujiu

harvest

mixing cement for a new road

more harvest

beautiful north Korean landscape – North Korea’s Landscapes are despite that bad things happening in them, awesomely beautiful. Can’t wait of NK to open.

Diversity of Dandong – no comment.