Thursday, August 19, 2010

An American Tourist In North Korea -- An Interview


What's It Like To Be A Tourist In North Korea? -- Foreign Policy

An American business professor, Patrick Chovanec, visits fields, casinos, and kindergartens in North Korea -- and explains how the Hermit Kingdom is and is not like Mordor.

On special guided trips, arranged for tourists and permitted by Pyongyang, Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing, has twice visited North Korea. On each trip, he and his fellow travelers were accompanied by official guides, only permitted in certain areas, and asked to delete "objectionable" photos from their digital cameras. Yet the visits afforded Chovanec a rare glimpse inside the Hermit Kingdom.

FP recently caught up with Chovanec to share his experiences to take us, vicariously, inside Kim Il Sung's mausoleum, a North Korean classroom, and a gilded casino that has seen better days. What we learned: North Korea is indeed a real place, where ordinary people must make due in extraordinary circumstances.

Read more ....

My Comment: My nationality is Russian .... so I have had a taste of what Communism is. But I suspect that the North Korean version is more Stalinist than the Soviet version in the 1970s-80s .... sighhhh .... the North Korean citizens are living in hell.

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