And this view from the window by the elevator:
Our bus, most of the Chinese tourists, and their guide met us outside the hotel at 7:30, and so our first full day in DPRK began. We were headed northeast of Pyongyang to see Mount Myohyangsan, but first we had a bit more of a Pyongyang tour.
Watching Pyongyang go to work was fascinating. Again, there were few cars on the road, although there were plenty of public buses, pedestrians, and cyclists. Eun Mee insists most people are underground taking the metro; although I have become a skeptic when it comes to North Korean skeptics, in this case I feel like she "protests too much." In other words, I remain unconvinced that Pyongyang is actually moving the vast majority of its millions of people underground on the two-line metro system that does not cross the river which divides the city in two. So, I am unsure what to make of the fact that there does not seem to be a rush hour worthy of a city of Pyongyang's size (supposed to be almost three million people).
Maybe the most interesting part of Pyongyang's workday morning was the groups of women choreographically waving red flags and singing (to inspire the workforce, of course).
Our only stop on the way-out-of-Pyongyang tour was to photograph the Arch of Triumph. The Arch of Triumph is an enormous knock-off of the Paris Arc de Triomphe, but despite lack of general creativity, the arch is very impressive.
Meanwhile our ears were being treated to political messaging being played through speakers on top of a propaganda van (I didn't get a picture of it here, but saw one later that I was able to photograph).
From the Arch of Triumph we continued our way north, past the April 25 House of Culture, which is where most recently the Worker's Party of Korea held its 7th Congress.
Outside of Pyongyang, we drove along the highway for almost three, very bumpy hours.
At one spot in particular we passed countless bicycles parked on the side of the highway (as in Pyongyang, there are more cyclists on the highway than vehicles).
Another interesting sight was this dam:
At some point we turned off the highway and entered the park. Andrea and I had already been quite impressed with DPRK's natural beauty--nothing we had read before coming had led us to expect gorgeous landscape. Presumably DPRK's underdevelopment has resulted in a cleaner, less human-impacted environment.
But while all of what we saw of DPRK's countryside is lovely, Mount Myohyangsan park is simply spectacular.
The Hyangsan Hotel is here, which looks pretty cool (note that it too has a revolving restaurant on top). Tourists are allowed to stay here, and if I ever go back to DPRK it would be on my list of things I would be interested in doing. Not surprisingly, there is apparently pretty good hiking at Mount Myohyangsan, and tourists can do that, but today we were here to do other things.
We picked up two new guides before parking by the International Friendship Exhibition.
One of the new guides went with the Chinese tourists and their "permanent" guide, and one went with Andrea and me and Eun Mee. The new guide did the guiding, and Eun Mee did the translating.
The International Friendship Exhibition consists of several buildings, and we visited two of them.
Photography inside is strictly prohibited, so we don't have any pictures. Both buildings are basically palatial, with countless rooms, marble floors, enormous doors, chandeliers, and so on. They serve as museums for the collection of gifts the Kims have received from foreign leaders, dignitaries, and also completely insignificant people (e.g., Juche study groups, professors).
There are tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of these gifts, so we were able to only see a sample. It is an interesting and impressive display, but, of course, gift exchanges are simply a normal part of diplomacy, so no doubt any country's collection accumulated over many decades and put on display for tourists would be impressive.
What did not impress us was our Korean-speaking guide's attitude. She seems to have drank every last drop of Juche Kool Aid. Even Eun Mee when translating at one point had to add, somewhat under her breath, "some people say," as if to suggest that maybe the Kims aren't quite as remarkable as the guide's story implied.
Eventually we were led out to an upper floor balcony, where we could sit, drink ginseng tea, and enjoy the mountain view.
From the balcony we were led through a souvenir shop and then outside, where we made our way down to the bus parking lot.
The Chinese tourists were taking their time, so while Andrea and Eun Mee sat on the bus, I asked Eun Mee if I could walk around and take pictures. She said sure, and seemed unconcerned, so I walked around the parking lot taking pictures.
Eventually I headed over to a monument on the other side of the parking lot.
I was about halfway there when I heard the Korean-speaking guide yell something in Korean. I had a hunch she was not pleased at how far away I was going, so I turned around and sure enough, an annoyed-looking Eun Mee had stood up and come to the bus door. So now I learned how lucky we were to have Eun Mee as our guide and not an uptight, Kool Aid-drinking woman.
From the exhibition halls we drove a very short distance to Mount Myohyangsan's other man-made attraction, the centuries-old Buddhist temple called Pohyonsa. Most of Pohyonsa was destroyed during the Korean War, but many of the buildings have been restored. It remains one of DPRK's few Buddhist sites.
By now, of course, we are experienced Buddhist site tourists, and Pohyonsa gets an absolute "fail" as a Buddhist tourist attraction from me. There was a lone monk hanging around, looking surprisingly out of place (it crossed my mind that he might be an actor), but otherwise the place was deserted. It had much more of a museum feel than legitimate sacred site ambiance, and the lack of worshipers made it almost boring. Anyway, I am being overly harsh, because the complex was still very beautiful, and the setting serene, and watching how religion was dealt with by the guide (in a very sterile way) was interesting.
And then, after all that beauty, I visited the bathroom that looked like this:
Luckily for me I knew to eat quickly, and managed to finish not too long after the Chinese tourists. The food was delicious, but one thing that was interesting about this restaurant is that there were no lights on. The dining room was merely lit by the daylight coming through the windows. This lunch was also the only time the guides did not actually eat in a different room than we did. As at every single meal we ate in DPRK (other than breakfast), the only people in the restaurants were us tourists, the guides, and the servers.
After lunch we re-boarded the bus;
again greeting some school children (who managed to run behind the building before I could photograph them);
and headed back toward Pyongyang.
Back in Pyongyang, we passed the same poster that we had coming in from the airport;
and the April 25 House of Culture.
The tower is up on Moran hill, and in yet another of Pyongyang's nice city parks. A dad and his child played on the slope nearby.
Eun Mee explained to us that the tower is very popular with the Chinese tourists. She said pretty much all Chinese tourists can find a relative's name in the memorial book inside, which is interesting. I am not sure if this suggests that the vast majority of Chinese families had a relative fight in the Korean War, or if the vast majority of Chinese tourists to DPRK are coming because they had a relative fight in the Korean War.
Our next stop was across Pyongyang, in the suburb of Mangyongdae. Here there is the Mangyondae Forest Park, in which Kim Il Sung's (supposed) birthplace is preserved. I have no doubt that Kim Il Sung's family in fact had a farm and home here back in the day (Kim Il Sung was born in 1912), but I am skeptical that this particular building is over one hundred years old!
It was a nice park to visit, but I would have rather been bird-watching than listening to more Kim family propaganda.
From the birthplace back to the bus was actually quite a walk so we did get to enjoy the park. We also passed this painting of a young Kim Il Sung leaving his grandparents to go to China.
We rejoined the bus by this amusement park (actually "fun fair"), which is also in Mangyongdae Park.
We ate dinner nearby, at a restaurant called "1000 Seat Restaurant" (but I think there were no more than fifty seats in the place). This meal was hot pot, and it was especially interesting because the Chinese tourists seemed as unsure of what to do with the hot pot as we were. It seemed obvious that somehow this hot pot experience was quite different from what they were used to in China.
At every lunch and dinner in DPRK except for one (we had five total) there were something like four or five 600 ml bottles of beer, usually room temperature, which was poured for us into small glasses for us to drink. The Chinese tourists were excited to toast at the beginning of each meal, evidently adopting our Western method of doing so because they derived amusement from it. Other than that, however, most of them did not seem interested in actually drinking the beer, so in this case I walked out of the restaurant with a still-full bottle to drink the rest of the evening.
After dinner we drove the Chinese tourists to their hotel, as we did the previous night, and then on to ours. We had asked Eun Mee in the morning if she liked to bowl and, when she said yes, we asked if she would come bowling with us that evening. She said she would, and as we got to the hotel we again confirmed that she wanted to come with us. We arranged a time to meet at the bowling alley, but when we got there, she was not there. We waited and waited and eventually went ahead and bowled on our own. In the middle of the game the bowling alley hostess came over and told us that Eun Mee had called to say she couldn't come because she had a visitor. We don't know what to make of this: did she just not want to come? did she actually have a visitor? is she even allowed to bowl with tourists? I suppose we'll never know.
We had fun bowling nonetheless, and then turned in early to ready for another early morning start the next day.
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