On May Day we got to get up a little later and were going to spend the whole morning joining in the May Day celebrations. Today at breakfast I got the toast and omelet that I missed the day before, among other things. The omelet didn't have any fillings, but was made the same way as they do in Japan, where after it's nearly cooked they shake it down to the edge of the pan to get it to roll into a nice tapered shape.
I thought it would be cool here like it was in Japan when I left, but it ended up being fairly warm. The few clothes I brought were for cooler temperatures, so with us going to be out in the sun all day, I figured I might as well wear the Korean flag t-shirt I had bought yesterday.
Kim Il Sung Stadium
And the picture next to it with the TV tower to the left.
We passed this a few times but I'm not sure if I ever got a much better picture of it. I don't know if it has a special name or anything.
Some new apartment highrises.
I dunno if I was trying to get a picture of that playground or what.
Occasionally we'd pass these huts behind these walls with mostly military people inside it seemed. A couple days later we drove by another set with a much better view and Miss Kim said not to take pictures of it. I think they're military barracks? Maybe they live like that as a form of discipline to toughen them up?
A volleyball game.
The mausoleum that we couldn't go to.
The first place we headed out to was a park where there was a big old traditional gate, and a field behind that where a big crowd of people were playing various sports games. Behind all that there was an amusement park. We didn't head back to the amusement park at all, but the rides were going the whole time. We were going to be here about an hour and a half and they let us just walk freely around the park and mingle. At first we just stood around clumped together watching the games, but eventually started wandering off. I noticed some people up on the gate, so went to go up there myself and get some videos from above, but just starting up the steps someone rushed over to me waving their arms. I thought maybe we weren't allowed to go up there after all, but apparently we just had to pay a small fee, so I did and went on up. There were a few people from another tourist group up there and I only stayed up a few minutes and took a few pictures of the gate and a video of the current game being played before heading back down.
View back from the gate.
View of the field from the gate.
I wanted to get a closer up picture of the people, so I put the gate in the background to look more inconspicuous.
Typical school uniform.
The games were all played in teams, and I think the teams were organized by people's workplaces. After each game was finished they'd have a little award ceremony for it, with the losers getting little memo pads as a consolation prize. Sometimes a tourist would get pulled in to participate in a game, so then afterwards they would get pulled into the award ceremony too and get their notepad.
After a while I wandered around to the back of the crowd and found a bunch of people in my group playing with a volleyball, so joined them for a few minutes before wandering away again. Watching some more of the games, Mr. Lee asked if I wanted to join in, which I agreed to, so he went and asked about it and came back saying I could be in the next game which was something with a ball and your head that he didn't really describe beyond that. So eventually the time for that came and I could see what was happening. Two people each held balls under each arm, and then a fifth ball between their heads, and ran down the field, around a wicket, and back. I got paired up to some young woman, who was gesturing at my face and saying something in Korean and I realized she wanted me to take off my glasses so they wouldn't get crushed against my face by the ball. It was actually pretty hard to do because the ball would keep rolling to the side out from between our heads, so we'd start out holding it between our foreheads and end up with it between our temples and trying to half support it with our hands. (I think the point of holding the balls under our arms was so that we wouldn't be able to use them to hold the other ball.) So that's what I'm doing in the commemorative photo that I got. And of course I ended up with a bit of a sunburn on my face from being out in the sun here all morning.
The guides extended our time here a little more than they had originally
said, so we got to participate in the tug-of-war too before we
eventually got back on the bus and left.
The entrance to the zoo across the street.
One of the few gas stations.
The April 25 House of Culture again.
Some less modern apartments.
The Chollima Statue, which we only ever drove past.
Part of the Moranbong Hill complex.
The complex from the side. You can see the statues in the distance.
The statues again.
Traffic!
Our best view of the statues.
Our next stop was Moranbong Hill. This place was insanely crowded and even Jessica said that she had never seen it this crowded out of all the festivals she'd been here for. We just walked a winding path through the park all the way up the hill and the guides had a hell of a time keeping track of all of all of us as we kept getting separated by the crowds. With the way everyone was laughing and singing and dancing and carrying on having a good time just like any other people in any other country would on a holiday, it was at this point that it stopped feeling like we were in the evil soulless North Korea and just in north Korea, a place on the Korean peninsula with a bunch of Koreans speaking Korean and just living the sort of lives and doing the sort of things that people anywhere did. At one point one of the members of our group stopped to dance with a group that was playing music, and got a small cup of some kind of rice wine in return which they passed around to the rest of us to try.
So eventually we got to the top of the hill where there was a lookout point and spent just a couple minutes looking before heading back down. The guides were all separated from each other with some members of the group with each of them, and there were so many people here that the cell network was jammed and they couldn't even call each other to find out where the others were, but eventually we all made it down and regrouped and got back on the bus to head to lunch.
The lookout point.
The view.
An entrance to the park.
On the way over Miss Kim told the George Bush goes to heaven joke (this wasn't the only George Bush joke she told on the trip either, she must have been using these for years, at least she should update them now by replacing Bush with Trump), but instead of saying "God" she used the phrase "king of heaven". I wondered if that was a deliberate omission of God, or if it was just a matter of being a culture (East Asia in general) that didn't evolve with a monotheistic religion, so this was just more a translation of how the joke might be told in Korean. I believe Chinese uses the phrase "heaven king" in place of "God" as well.
Kim Il Sung Stadium again.
A wider shot of the parking lot next to it.
The lawn in front of the House of Culture.
The April 25 House of Culture.
A nice up close shot of the Ryugyong Hotel.
Konguk Station of the Pyongyang Metro.
Don't know what this is, but it looks important.
A train pulling out of Pyongyang Station.
You can see the Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia flanking each other here like I mentioned before.
In any case, we got to the restaurant which served the usual array of side dishes before the main dish of bibimbap. One of the side dishes was these crabs with egg sacs attached, which a couple people ventured to try, but there was so much food in the form of all the other side dishes that I didn't end up trying it.
After lunch we got to ride one of the trollybusses! But not with the Koreans. We got an empty one all to ourselves, and we weren't even using it to get to any particular destination, I think we actually just ended up going around the block in it. The main reason not to ride along with the Koreans though would be, not because they were trying to keep us apart from them, but just because those busses were always crowded as hell, and even the at stops just before a bus would come there would be a crowd of people waiting for it. That would be the sort of thing that just a few years ago the guides would probably try to stop people taking pictures of as it would give a negative image of their transportation system, but for us there was never any trying to stop us from taking pictures of any street scenes, even a potentially "negative" one like that (and I'm pretty sure I did get some pictures of such crowded stops). I even read in a blog from a few years ago that someone was stopped from trying to take a picture of one of the little snack shops (which I also have in many of my pictures) and was trying to explain to the guide that there wasn't even anything negative about that, that there are food carts and stalls in cities all over the world, even New York City. So anyway, we rode a reserved trollybus.
There were rows of red stars painted on the side of it that they told us to notice and that they would be explained later. So we all crowded on and took our seats. The thing was super cramped, my knees were wedged up against the seatback in front of me and I'm on the small side to begin with, and some of the others just sat sideways with their legs in the aisle instead. So we got going and then they explained that each red star on the side of the bus was for 10,000 kilometers of safe travel. Now there were a lot of stars on the side of this thing and a lot of the others were skeptical of this claim, and even I was thinking that maybe it was just a misunderstanding, maybe it was every 1000 kilometers or 10,000 meters or something, but if you think about it, if this thing was running all day every day it could probably cover a good 100km a day, which would then be 30,000 a year, or three stars a year. And this thing was clearly very old, certainly these things were always repaired and re-repaired rather than ever being replaced, so actually the claim bears out.
That conical building in the background is the ice rink.
The indoor stadium.
I think that building in the background is the International Telecommunications Center.
Then they introduced the driver who had been driving this thing pretty much his whole life. I forget exactly what it was for, whether the safe driving or something else, but he had a ring that was given to him by one of the leaders (Kim Jong Il I think?) which they mentioned and that some people got pictures of later. Then they introduced the conductor of the bus, who was his wife. Of course this prompted people to ask whether they had first met on the bus, and the guides asked, and it turned out that they had
So next after the trollybus ride they offered to take us to the circus if we wanted, and of course all of us did, except the two Slavs, so Mr. Lee took them to a cafe while the rest of us went to the circus. I think about half the audience was tourists, and about half of the other half was military. And as you would expect from any modern society, right before they started the performance someone's cell phone went off.
Pyongyang Circus
The stage: small, but adequate.
The audience.
The performance was framed at a couple points by a woman narrating something in Korean, so I assume there was some kind of patriotic framing narrative, as it seems most forms of entertainment like this need some sort of political message in order to be considered legitimate, but otherwise it was just a cute little circus with the typical acts you would expect. No animals, but they had a few trapeze acts, a strongman, jugglers, this giant hamster wheel type thing that people ran around the inside and outside of, and between acts, the two clowns. Not the kind with big shoes and red noses, but just two blokes goofing off with each other Three Stooges style. Sometimes they pulled tourists from the audience who they worked into their acts. It was a good time. The craziest thing though was the applause. There was music playing throughout the show (there was actually a small orchestra up in the corner behind the audience that I didn't even notice until they were applauded at the end of the show), and after the acts when everyone applauded, it was done in sync to the beat of the music. It was the weirdest thing. And sometimes when you see videos of North Korean celebrations you can see people doing the same thing. I don't know what the reason behind it is or how it ever got started, if it was ever decreed or encouraged by one of leaders at one point, but us tourists eventually caught on and were all doing the same by the end of the show.
The Taekwondo hall.
The weightlifting gymnasium.
The basketball and volleyball gymnasium.
So we met back up with the cafe folks and got on the bus and were asked if we wanted to go for bowling or start off straight for Kaesong, which we were going to that evening. Well, it was kind of a long day and we didn't want to get into Kaesong too late (especially since we were going to have dinner there), so we all decided to skip the bowling and head off. The trip was about two and a half hours on a very wide, and very empty, undivided highway. It had plenty of potholes which the driver expertly guided us around, but that didn't stop the trip from being extremely bumpy. Just to the south of Pyongyang is the Reunification Monument, placed here since this is the road to Seoul. And I dare say that the reason the highway is so wide is to facilitate troop movement in the event of a future war.
The Sci-tech Center on Ssuk Islet.
The Reunification Monument.
You can stand in the middle of the road when there's no traffic.
These things were on the side.
About halfway to the border is a "rest stop", which is this building straddling the highway which apparently has a restaurant inside, but we just hung around outside for fifteen minutes while the driver had a smoke and everyone bought some drinks and snacks at the little stand just inside the door. So then we continued on and got to our hotel in Kaesong sometime after dark.
Our first real glimpse of the countryside. Again, there were zero restrictions on pictures (except military checkpoints).
It was planting season, so all the fields are freshly plowed.
We could see plenty of villages in the distance, and the pics are pretty hi-res, so load the full pics and zoom in to get a look at them.
I doubt many of these places have electricity, but the housing looks pretty decent.
Tree planting going on out here too.
The offramp had a nicely manicured lawn and decorative structures. I think we can all draw our own conclusions about misallocation of resources in a poor country though.
It looked like there were actually some rice paddies built up on the left there.
The train line.
Away from the plains of Pyongyang it started to get mountainous.
Some interesting apartment blocks (assuming that's what they are).
This was one of the better views we got of a whole village.
Some villages would have their own obelisk like this. Not sure what the big building is, maybe a school? Maybe just apartments?
The rest stop/restaurant that spans the highway.
So we had dinner at the hotel, and this was probably the best of the hotel food that we had while we were here, but the special thing was that this was where we could order dog soup! So of course a few of us paid the extra fee to get that, and it was actually really good! The meat tasted a lot like lamb, and the guy from New Zealand who had been raised on a ranch said that it was more like mutton than lamb, but he was also equally impressed with it. I would totally have it again. Everyone was obsessed with finding out what breed of dog they used, but of course it's no specific breed, just some mongrel.
The entryway inside the hotel room.
The floor had a straw mat, similar to Japanese tatami.
Dog soup with ginseng wine and a cold beer.
All the hotels had nice dining rooms.
Just inside the hotel entrance.
The Janamsan Hotel. It was dark when we arrived, but I took this the next morning.
The specialty item of Kaesong is ginseng, and at the little bar just outside the dining room they had a ginseng-infused liquor, so we got a glass of that to have with dinner, and another glass afterwards to retire to the billiards room with. I played a little table tennis with someone for a while, and later with Mr. Lee, and then everyone took turns playing pool and eventually tried to teach Miss Han how to play since it turned out she never had. She didn't want to, but this is an important skill for a tour guide, so we insisted. Eventually Miss Kim came and relieved her, and as expected she knew what she was doing and did pretty good.
Even though I hadn't paid the extra fee for a single room, I never had to room with anyone else at any of the hotels except for this night, with an old guy from the short tour group, but he went to bed right after dinner and was sound asleep when I turned in, so no bother there.
Tomorrow I would get my first view of South Korea.
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