Tag Archives: DPRK travel

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Say

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Ryan Murdock

This is the eighteenth and final installment in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here

 

One “special request” we filed with our minders was to be permitted to walk into Pyongyang unescorted, perhaps as far as the railway station and back. Much to our surprise, they said it was possible. They had already added several of the places we asked to see–a grocery store, a shop, and the amusement park–but we weren’t terribly optimistic about this one.

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A North Korean Shopping Mall

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Ryan Murdock

This is the eleventh in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here

 

It took me nearly a week to realize why Pyongyang felt so much like a stage set. It wasn’t just the marble monuments and the enormous public buildings, the empty ten-lane streets and the weird scarcity of people. It was the almost total absence of shops. In all our bus rides through the city, I’d seen nothing to suggest that people actually lived there.

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Inside the North Korean School System

Posted on November 2, 2009 by Ryan Murdock

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 earned. I wonder how I would have fared in Pyongyang?

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