WORST. HANGOVER. EVER. It wasn't even all that bad after waking up and I went down and had breakfast like normal, and plenty of liquids, but within a couple hours I was terribly nauseous and it lasted the entire rest of the day. The bumpy roads we sped over the whole time probably didn't help either. Oh well, so it goes when you have a night full of gasoline clams and cheap soju.
The inside of the "cottage" my room was in.
The outside of it.
The recreation room we were in the night before. Some kind of shooting gallery thing is set up.
The area in the middle of the ring road with the cottages.
The main building.
There's a pheasant right in the middle of the picture. We saw one in the park/forest by the Native House on the first day too.
Also the area inside the ring road.
In any case, the breakfast was pretty good, some more of that fig jam for the toast like we had in Kaesong, I think a hard-boiled egg in one of those little egg cups, and some other things. Then we loaded up the bus again and headed out to the West Sea Barrage.
Some propaganda in the field.
Some kind of agriculture. An orchard of some kind?
Some kids waving at us. As usual, the nicest building in this town was the school.
The river or the sea?
So what the barrage is is just a very long dam-like pile of earth to separate the outlet of the Taedong River from the ocean so that the river water that far downstream can be used for irrigation and stuff without being contaminated with saltwater. They're very proud of it, and with good reason, because it's a fairly massive feat of engineering. The city is at one end of it, and the locks and other buildings at the other end, so we drove across the entire thing to get to our destination. Along the way, while we were driving across it, Miss Kim asked us if we could tell which side was the river and which side was the sea, but we couldn't at all, which shows how huge the river is at that point.
So we got to the building we were visiting, which is partly a small museum to the construction of it, and partly a monument to its construction, since the building acts as a base with the wide, paved roof of it hosting a small tower-like monument. So we went inside and were taken to a room where there was a model of the entire barrage and they pointed out the three locks and the size of ships that could fit through them, and then showed us an old, maybe fifteen-minute, video about the construction of the thing. After that we went back outside and up a ramp onto the roof to take in the view and get some pictures. That's all there was to do here, so then we loaded back onto the bus and headed back into the city.
Entrance to the building.
The lock complex from the ground.
The monument on top is in the shape of an anchor.
A model of the lock complex.
The barrage part.
The lock part.
Something back on the ground.
Next we drove through Nampo city on the way to another collective farm.
Nampo city. I think another school there in the foreground?
Side view of some statues.
They had Kim statues here too.
A traffic safety display.
Honestly there's nothing special to say about the farm, we saw more at the
previous one and this one wasn't really any different, so we just got
walked around and took some pictures.
A statue at the collective farm.
The plaza at the farm.
Writings by the three most important personages in North Korea: Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-suk (Kim Jong-il's mother)
After that we headed out to a bottled water plant. This was the first factory we got to go to since getting here, so we expected it to be interesting. Once inside the building they led us through the double-doored gate with blowers on the inside which would usually blow any dust and dirt off the workers as they went into the factory area, but for us tourists they just opened up both doors and let us march through without any cleaning, so so much for sanitation I guess. The hallways inside were all glass windows so you could see everything from pretty much everywhere. There was a little control room on one side (complete with Kim pictures) and the factory floor on the other side. But there was no one around and nothing was operating. It was about quarter to one maybe and the guides told us that everyone was on lunch. So someone mentioned maybe sticking around until they got back, but then the guides told us they were on lunch from noon to two, and we couldn't hang around until two. Well, everyone was suspicious about this two-hour lunch break in a country with a six-day workweek, but let it slide. They still wanted to see the machinery in action though and kept pestering the guides about getting someone to start it up for us for a few minutes, and finally a couple of workers came out and went inside and a few minutes later got the line running. The factory guy guiding us brought out a bottle and opened it up for us all to try.
At the bottled water plant.
The assembly line.
The control room.
The part that actually does the filling and capping.
It was carbonated, and the factory was built over a spring where the water came from, and I didn't quite catch it, but maybe it was naturally carbonated too? In any case, our next stop was to walk just out back behind the factory and see the spring. There was just a little hut back there at the end of a road and in the middle was a cap over the spring with a glass window that we could see the water surging up through. On the walls of the hut was some information on the spring, and I think the guides said something to the effect that there had once been an earthquake that stopped the spring, so they had to drill down to reach it again, and that's the current source of the water.
The road to the spring.
The spring.
Something about the geology of it I guess.
The design of the well.
The entrance to the plant.
That's all there was to do in Nampo, so now we headed back to Pyongyang for lunch. Lunch was Korean barbecue in a park just outside of Pyongyang. It looked pretty good, but I didn't think my stomach was in any state for a heavy meat lunch with my hangover, so I just munched on an apple and some vegetables and bread. The tour was starting to take its toll on a couple of the others too. One guy was stressed and upset that we always had to be together as a group at all times and that he couldn't just have a little distance or get a little apart from the group to take pictures or anything like that, and another woman, who had gotten really upset at something Mr. Lee said to her the other day about taking pictures that I never heard the full story on, was getting overly upset about the meat getting overcooked, and another women got some water spilled on her camera lens and was upset about that for the whole rest of the meal, but overall I think the length and intimacy and lack of freedom on the tour was really getting to a lot of people at this point. It was a nice park anyway.
The Pyongyang-Kaesong highway on the way back from Nampo.
The park where we ate lunch.
Mt. Ryongak amusement park.
The entrance to the park.
So after lunch we went to the film studio where they made such internationally acclaimed classics like The Flower Girl. The first thing we did after getting here was get the chance to rent costumes for a small fee. A couple of the guys volunteered and came out dressed in traditional king and queen outfits. (It's worth adding that the guy who dressed as the queen is gay.) So we wandered around the first set which was of a traditional Korean town, and came across a wedding party, who thought it was an absolute riot to see a guy dressed up like a queen and everyone pulled out their phones to get pictures of our happy couple, and we all got pictures of them together with the wedding couple as well.
Mural at the film studio.
The same three writings we saw in Nampo.
The traditional Korean village set.
Pictures of the costumes.
Our happy couple. Mr. Kim is amused.
Our queen with the husband of a wedding party.
The happy couples.
There were a couple other sections of the sets that we saw here, including a set of turn-of-the-century Japan, where all the shops had legitimate Japanese signage and advertisements that I could read.
The pre-war Japanese film set.
Air travel company.
Western clothing shop, glasses shop.
Now we finally got to go to the Schoolchildren's Palace that we had been seeing so often as we went around Pyongyang. The guides told us that in Korea they had a saying that "children are kings", which is why they called the place a palace. Basically it just hosted afterschool activities for the kids, like sports, music lessons, and extra classes, so basically all the same things that Japanese kids go to afterschool too, except that in Japan they often do it as part of clubs at their schools. So we went through much of the building and saw a volleyball practice in one of the gyms, a physics class, a computer programming class(!), embroidery, calligraphy, ballet, and accordion lessons.
I think this is a youth history museum.
Kids at the Palace. Going on a field trip?
The entrance steps were lined with animal sculptures.
Chandelier in the entrance hall.
Something from Kim Il-sung.
We never once anywhere saw a map of only northern Korea. Every depiction was always the entire peninsula.
They have their own missile here too.
Volleyball practice.
Computer programming (in Visual Basic) and spreadsheets.
Physics class.
Embroidery class.
Calligraphy.
Accordion practice.
Gayageum practice.
Dance practice with those creepy smiles.
Entrance to the swimming pool.
A mural in the stairwell.
Finally, after all this, we and a great number of other tour groups filed into the large auditorium for a performance. The whole thing was about an hour long and had a number of song and dance acts, with live music performed by the kids as well. I didn't bother to take any videos of it, but they did sell DVDs of it that a couple people bought.
Finally, we headed off for a beer bar. It's too bad that I was hungover as hell, because this would have been a nice highlight. It sounded though like there really wasn't that super of a selection of different styles or anything, basically the same basic brew made with different balances of barley and rice, so in the end I don't think I missed much.
After that we headed off to Pyongsong, a city just forty-five minutes or so north of Pyongyang. The sun had already set by this point so we just went straight to the hotel for dinner and I crashed early in hopes that I would be in better shape in the morning.
View from the hotel window in Pyongsong.
This little anime sticker was on the coffee thermos thing.
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