
Six Days in North Korea - tswartz
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/10/world/asia/north-korea-photos-video.html?_r=0
======
Zirro
For those who would like to follow North Korea on a more than casual basis,
these sites are likely to be of interest:

* NK News ([http://nknews.org](http://nknews.org))

* DailyNK ([https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php](https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php))

And perhaps especially since this is HN:

* North Korea Tech ([https://www.northkoreatech.org](https://www.northkoreatech.org))

~~~
dominotw
[https://www.facebook.com/dprk360](https://www.facebook.com/dprk360)

~~~
yakshemash
[http://38north.org/](http://38north.org/)

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colinbartlett
NY Times team did a great job of making this responsive. It works really well
on mobile.

That said, this is best viewed on desktop on a huge monitor. It looks
gorgeous. Really, beautiful job to their front end team, consistently
delivering this kind of experience.

~~~
adolfojp
And yet the video was awful in every way. It cut too fast, not allowing us to
fully appreciate what was going on, and it had no playback controls so if you
missed anything you have to wait for the entire thing to loop back up. Did you
see the blue box that trapped the foot? I don't know what that was.

~~~
ubersync
It covers your shoe with a polythene shoe cover. Mostly used in hospitals.

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atemerev
You do realize that everything in these pictures is thoroughly and carefully
pre-selected and even engineered for display purposes, right?

(I was born in the Soviet Union. It is mostly unknown for Western people how
much propaganda matters in totalitarian countries, and how little it has to do
with reality).

~~~
EliRivers
Having been there on holiday myself, the only way to ensure that everything is
pre-selected and engineered would be to effectively shut down the entire city
(indeed, every city and town I went to), and create a kind of bubble around
each of our buses (and, when we switched to foot, around each pocket of
walking tourists); fake cities filled with actors, all standing and doing
nothing until someone shouts "The bus is almost visible" at which point they
break into action like a pack of extras on a Hollywood set, pretending to be
walking somewhere as the bus passes, only to stop as soon as it's out of
sight. Everyone's life on permanent hold, just waiting to show the tourists
what it looks like when people walk on the pavement. What glory for the
Fatherland that is!

To say that "everything in these pictures is thoroughly and carefully pre-
selected and even engineered" is simply not true.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>effectively shut down the entire city

So.. you guys were carefully corralled in the city? N Korea is mostly rural,
with most of its population barely able to get enough calories to eat.
Pyongyang is a propagandist show-room and is full of connected party types.
Your average N Korean doesn't live that lifestyle. This is all fairly well
documented by various sources, mostly via the oral histories of defectors:

[http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-
North/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-
North/dp/0385523912)

[http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-
Odyssey/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-
Odyssey/dp/0143122916)

If you care to discredit these works, I will argue with you on a point to
point basis. I have read both and other sources that describe the regime and
everyday life in North Korea. Perhaps we can also get Dennis Rodman in here
too but clearly you both are on the same page.

Sadly, I find North Korea cheerleading often to be a biased political position
tied to the usual pro-China HN crowd that finds fault with everything the
US/EU do, thus anything the US/EU are critical of, must be good and any
criticism of these regimes must be "western propaganda."

~~~
EliRivers
_So.. you guys were carefully corralled in the city?_

No. We travelled through rural regions as well; small towns and so forth. I
saw (but did not go into) numerous very small villages. Those were not much
more than a collection of buildings, generally with a dirt track leading to it
from the road we were on.

In the city, whilst walking with our two guides, the distance between the
front walker and the rear walker was on the order of a hundred metres at
times. When I went there, it was a significant national holiday. Some of the
exhibition centres we went to had literally thousands of people flowing
through them while we were there. We were in the crowds, mixing in with the
people attending. Huge flows of people. At a military parade, we stepped off
the bus and stood with the crowd to watch. On the underground, we stepped onto
the carriages with the locals who were waiting for the train. A funfair in
Pyongyang; huge, huge queues outside and inside. Enormous numbers of people
milling about and again, our group wandered through them.

I saw numerous signs of deprivation and malnutrition. I saw extensive evidence
of a massive solid fuel shortage in recent years. I saw a lot of things that
made it clear that the nation is, in many many ways, truly grotesque. I also
saw an upright stuffed alligator on wheels holding a drinks tray that David
Koresh of Waco fame had sent as a gift.

I would hazard (but of course do not know) that I know more about the subject
than you do (both before and after travelling there I read an enormous amount
of the available literature and various collections of conference
proceedings), and I have the additional evidence of my own eyes.

The western media LOVES to spin stories about the DPRK, and the western public
LOVES to read them. There is a lot - a LOT - wrong with the DPRK, but the
media seem to be able to write pretty much anything they like and people want
to believe it. You know what, go there and see it for yourself. Run in the
Pyongyang marathon. Do a cycling tour.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>I would hazard (but of course do not know) that I know more about the subject
than you do

I have read two books from defectors, who I imagine had more personal
involvement and first-hand experience than some western tourist who fancies
himself an expert because he went cycling there once.

Tourism isn't the wonderful learning experience you make it out to be. Its, by
its nature, 100% artificial. You have no skin in this game. You can walk out
at any time and your money is coveted so you get treated and handled a certain
way compared to a local. Tourism doesn't teach you jack shit about the country
you're visiting and I say this as someone with two passports who visits his
parent's native country frequently. I am not an expert on that country even
though speak the language, have family there, etc. I just dont have skin in
the game and when I'm there I'm treated like a tourist - not a local. I dont
ever have to interview for a job there, deal with the authorities really, pay
taxes, deal with the local mafioso/crooked cops/bad government past a
superficial level, deal with any of the everyday grind outside of tourist
framework, serve in their military, etc.

I wish more North Korean apologists understood this. Instead we have an online
army of Dennis Rodmans trivializing the human rights catastrophe in North
Korea because the food they were served was okay and the locals all smiled as
you drove past in your air conditioned bus.

~~~
crdoconnor
I'd be skeptical of some of the more outlandish defector testimonies. They
have a strong incentive to exaggerate and invent stories, and owing to the
relative seclusion of North Korea, it's pretty easy to not get called on it.

Many of the defector testimonies also comes from the mid 90s, when North Korea
was undergoing a famine, and while that famine was _really_ severe, it was
still 20 years ago and their malnutrition levels have plunged precipitously
since. If it were still that bad today, probably the regime would have
collapsed already.

Tourism in the country is very controlled, but it's not 100%. Kernels of truth
will slip through. Honestly, the propaganda and the truth is quite easy to
distinguish, too - their propaganda is very unsophisticated and pretty blunt
and not every tour guide is a mindless brainwashed automaton.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>They have a strong incentive to exaggerate and invent stories, and owing to
the relative seclusion of North Korea, it's pretty easy to not get called on
it.

So anything that contradicts North Korea state propaganda must be untrue? Oh,
ok.

~~~
crdoconnor
You know, you could just swap the phrase "North Korea state propaganda" with
"American impeeeerialists" (you must draw out the e) and you'd sound exactly
of like one of them.

------
gambiting
I was always fascinated by cars in North Korea - what brands do they use? How
do they get there? What do you have to do to drive one? Exactly how uncommon
are they? Who fixes them, and how do they know how? If the supreme leader is
driven in a Mercedes, how do they get the parts for it?

I come from Poland where during communist times cars were really hard to come
by, you had to wait 10 years on an official list to be allowed to buy one, but
people always managed to get by somehow. Most models were of course of Soviet
production, but an odd western car would sometimes appear, imported through
friends of friends of someone in the party. Obviously NK is completely
different, but I still find it very interesting, and it's hard to find any
information about this anywhere.

~~~
Symbiote
An article from 2014 suggests the government use at least one Mercedes, and
probably bought it via Russia or China. I'd guess they just drive it over the
border...

Maybe parts don't count as "luxury vehicles", in which case they can buy them
from Europe. Alternatively, China/Russia.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11013338/Mercedes-
limousines-spotted-in-North-Korea-could-breach-UN-sanctions.html)

~~~
ams6110
China produces compatible parts for almost every car, including Mercedes.

------
coldcode
The empty freeway from the window was the killer shot for me. Imagine if you
showed the average citizen there a picture of LA or even Beijing during rush
hour.

~~~
tswartz
Yes, its so interesting to see those types of pictures. I'd be fascinated to
hear what North Koreans think of the freeway system in their country since few
people use it.

------
jeffzilla
Hey, I've been there!

I ran my fastest marathon ever while being tailed by the paddy wagon, suited
up and bowed down before the embalmed body of Kim Jong Il, locked and loaded
to shoot at chickens, and tripped out in psychedelic halls of mirrors in the
DPRK - North Korea.

Here's how it all went down...

[http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-
kor...](http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-korea-and-
running-the-pyongyang-marathon/)

------
mrcactu5
I am impressed that Pyongyang appears in Google maps
[https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongya...](https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongyang/@39.0338528,125.6923056,13z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x357e1d28b1b75405:0x283ff682d04744d6)
I was looking for the giant Ryuyong Hotel in the center of town.

~~~
yitchelle
Clicking on some of the landmarks around the hotel, they have some Google
reviews. The reviews for the Pyongyang Arena makes interesting reading.

[https://www.google.com.pr/search?q=Pyongyang+Arena,+Pyongyan...](https://www.google.com.pr/search?q=Pyongyang+Arena,+Pyongyang,+Corea+del+Norte&ludocid=9068691185340548019#lrd=0x357e1d31fa7eca45:0x7dda7695c7f083b3,1)

