DPRK: Various Monuments

The day’s itinerary was, as usual, laid out before us, but the weather made it less than appealing. We were to stop for a photograph of the Three Charters Monument, visit the Great Leader’s birthplace, visit an open air sculpture park, visit the Pyongyang Metro, visit the Great Leader’s monument (also in the open), go to a fairground to celebrate the Leader’s birthday. Not a promising list for such a day.

We did stop at the services and again for the Three Charters photo opportunity, miraculously in a very brief gap in the worst of the rain, but by the time we reached Mangyondae, the birthplace of the Leader, it was pouring again.

Clearly we could not miss out such an important place but our visit was as brief as it’s possible to be, a fifteen minute tour of the main bit with a guide explaining about Kim Il Sung’s early life and then back onto the bus.

It was still raining hard when we reached our next stop - the Pyongyang Metro. Anyone who hasn't seen this kind of overblown communist architecture might be wondering why on Earth we would want to visit the metro. I wondered myself until we got in there. We were allowed, accompanied of course, to ride the metro for one stop so we saw two stations. They were designed and built with an opera-house grandeur. There was more of that marble everywhere. There were rows of elaborate, multicoloured crystal chandeliers. There were massive murals of workers, of the Great and Dear Leaders, of revolutionary scenes. The metro itself on the other hand, though efficient enough could hardly be considered a model of modern comfort; the design of it, with it's hard leather seats and harsh lighting reminded me of the kind of buses and trains we had in the UK maybe forty years ago when I was at school.The weather had eased a bit once more by the time we reached the Great Leader’s statue. This is twenty three metres high and is, according to our guides, solid bronze. Given that a 10cm cube of bronze weighs about eight kilograms then a metre cube of bronze would weigh about 8000 kg and such a statue would, I estimate, weigh about two million kilograms.

I didn’t do that calculation at the time but, suspicious of this “fact” I did ask the question. I was told that the statue weighs “as much as the hearts of all the people of Korea”.

Actually the statue is, political ideology apart, extremely impressive. It isn’t just the statue of the leader, it is flanked by two enormous reliefs representing the flag of the country and the revolutionary struggle. There is no need for such an obvious and transparent fiction. It’s wonder enough without it.

After that it was back to the hotel where we had lunch in the revolving restaurant that sits at the very top of the structure looking out over the city. Lunch was excellent though for once my mushroom allergy got me the better deal. Instead of a vegetable soup (containing mushrooms) I was given a bowl of truly delicious pumpkin soup which was quite the nicest thing I had eaten in days.

In view of the weather we were also presented with a new itinerary for the rest of the day. After freshening up and changing into slightly smarter clothes we were to head out for the Sate Symphony Hall to see and hear a concert by the Korean Sate Symphony Orchestra, follow that with a visit to the annual flower festival celebrating Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, stop briefly for some more photographs of monuments then finish the day with a traditional Korean duck barbecue in a restaurant.

How is that even possible?

I've been having problems with my computer recently. Basically certain websites have, when I connect to them, been behaving rather oddly. Not logging me in properly, not letting me have access to certain sections of them. Giving me access to a different random selection of pages each time I log in. Plain weird.

I tried connecting on different computers with different operating systems and using different firewalls. No joy.
I contacted the sites to find out if I was alone in this. I was.
I contacted my ISP and spent a lot of time on the phone without success.
I took my laptop and modem to a shop and we tried an apparently identical modem with my laptop and my modem with an apparently identical laptop. The problem suddenly semed to be with my modem.
I spent more time on the support line and we agreed to replace both the modem and the sim card, though neither of us could see how either of those things could produce such strange symptoms.

They said they would send a new sim and a secure envelope to return the modem. The sim came this morning and I popped it into my old modem and lo and behold, the problem has gone away.

My question is this. How in the hell is it even possible for a sim card to have a fault that specifically produces that kind of error on certain sites and no errors at all on any other sites?

I don't get it.

Alices In Wonderland: Part 46

Among the witnesses, there is the Mad Hatter...

This illustration is from a "Best Loved Stories" edition from World International Publishing Limited. (1984). The text is abridged for young readers but the art is uncredited.

A little walk

I spent this morning chasing my tail in a frustrating attempt to get some computer problems I've been having resolved. Eventually, after a promise of some action from my ISP, I gave up, put my camera in my pocket and went for a walk.
I live in the middle of what my old geography teacher used to call the "West Midlands Conurbation". I've never thought of it as especially pretty or scenic, but, if you choose your route carefully, you can, even here, get away from the roads and traffic. Here are a few of the pictures I took. More will be appearing sometime soon on my other blog.
The interesting thing about these pictures is that at no point in the hour and a half that I was walking was I ever more than about a minute away from a main road.

DPRK: Kaesong Folk Hotel

From the mountain we drove to our lodgings for the evening, the delightful Kaesong Folk Hotel where guests stay in traditional style rooms, sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor with hard blocks for a pillow. On the way we passed the town square where the children's festival was still going on and moments later drove into the car park of the hotel.
The complex is built across a small stream and the individual blocks contain several rooms around small courtyards.

We dropped our belongings in the rooms and went out to take a couple of pictures before a tasty but uncomfortable dinner, again in the traditional Korean style, seated on the floor. The only downside to the whole thing was that we were not allowed to leave the grounds of the hotel, not even by a few paces to take photographs in the street.
That notwithstanding it was a very pleasant place to finish the day.

Next morning, when we went down for breakfast, we also realised that we could see the distant statue of Kim Il Sung on top of the hill. Had we looked for it in the dark of the previous evening, after we had spent an hour or two in the candlelit environs of the bar - the power having gone off shortly after our arrival - we would also have seen it. The various monuments to the two leaders around the country are among the few things where power is most carefully maintained even through the frequent power cuts that afflict everywhere else.

Joined up programme planning

The new Terminator movie opens here very soon. Naturally this means that the previous three Terminator movies are showing on TV next week. They are showing on different channels. Terminator 3 shows on Channel 5 on Sunday. Terminator 2 shows on ITV on Wednesday and The Terminator (1) shows on BBC1 on Friday.

I know the movies have a time travel plot but isn't this just a touch silly?

Alices In Wonderland:Part 45

The defendant in the trial is, of course, the Knave of Hearts.

As an interesting (or perhaps not) aside, this is the role that I took, aged six or seven, in my infants school play. I had, as I recall, two lines. "It wasn't me." and "Do I look like it?"

This illustration is from another of those editions where I would like to give some information but can't. It's a Japanese edition and because I can't read a single word of Japanese I don't know the publisher or any other details. What I can say is that it, in spite of the picture below, quite typical Manga art by, according to the shop where I bought it (in Malaysia) Sakumo Shigeko.

As ever, if anyone can provide more details of the edition, I'd be grateful.

DPRK: Kongmin Tombs

The other site that we had to get in wasn't very far away and a few minutes later we arrived there: the tombs of King Kongmin and his wife. These are a genuine ancient monument dating to 1372. They are located in a quite charming area and a short stroll up the stone steps brings you to the twin mounds of the tombs. Here there are a number of excellent statues, virtually free of restoration and a view of the strangely named "Oh My" Mountain.
The legend of the name is that King Kongmin had been seeking for some time the perfect site for the tombs to be constructed. He had consulted all the best geomancers in the land but didn't like any of the suggestions. In despair he said that the next geomancer to provide a location would be richly rewarded if he liked it and executed if he didn't. The site was selected and Kongmin went to inspect it. He told his soldiers that if he didn't like it he would wave a handkerchief from the top of the hill as a signal to kill the geomancer. When he reached the top of the hill he found that it was a perfect site. However it was a hot day and he unthinkingly took out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. At the bottom of the hill they mistook this as the signal and killed the geomancer. When the king reached the bottom again they told him what had happened and he said "Oh My!". Since then, this has been the name of the mountain.

DPRK: In the news

There can't be many people who are not aware of the DPRK's nuclear test this week. It's been roundly condemned by pretty much everybody, though I doubt most of the DPRK general public are aware of that. External news sources are pretty much non-existent in the country. The opposite isn't true though. On the BBC we saw a clip of the DPRK state broadcast announcing the news. I have no idea at all if the translation was accurate but that wasn't what interested me. I was fascinated by the DPRK announcer's voice which was shrieking and hysterical and bizarre in a lunatic-on-helium way.
I have, as you'll see in a couple of posts time, encountered this weird way of speaking in the DPRK before, from the announcer at the concert I attended at the State Symphony Hall. It struck me as ludicrously demented at the concert, as a style for reading the news it is quite the most bizarre thing I've seen in weeks.

Alices In Wonderland: Part 44

After quite a long delay, I'm picking up the threads of this sequence, so...

The trial, in which the court is trying to determine who stole the tarts, continues.

One of the lesser illustrators of Alice is, of course, Lewis Carroll who did his own illustrations for the first edition, which had the original title "Alice's Adventures Underground". There are a number of facsimile editions of this work that include the illustrations but, if truth be told, hiring a professional (Tenniel) for the first proper publication of the book was a wise decision. Carroll's illustrations are far too naive to appear in a professional work.

DPRK: Kaesong Children's Palace

Many things in the DPRK had reminded me of the China that I visited more than twenty years ago. The infrastructure of the country, the apparently unquestioning nature of the population, the disparity between those in the party apparatus and those not; all these things and more were similar. So when I discovered that the afternoon was to be a visit to a school, I thought that I knew exactly what it would entail. In that visit to China we had had just such a visit, in Shanghai, and I recall it to this day. We saw displays of expert dancing from groups of young girls and boys; we saw a group of students learning to create beautiful calligraphy; we saw a child of about six playing a complex piece of Bach watched by two beaming piano teachers; we saw displays of artistic, musical and gymnastic prowess that would have impressed anyone. We even saw a class of students assembling transistor radios. And at the time I recall remarking that I bet there wasn't a child in the whole showcase school that wasn't the son or daughter of a fully paid up party official.

This afternoon, I was sure, would be more of the same: the children of the elite (which of course doesn't exist in the DPRK) performing highly skilled routines in a school at Kaesong that the kids of those peasants toiling all day with their hands wouldn't ever have the slightest chance of getting near.


Under normal circumstances that's exactly what it would have been. In fact it started out that way. We stopped the bus some way from the school and walked towards it. There were large groups of uniformed school children laying flowers at the feet of a statue of the Great Leader. In the school we saw some displays of basketball and karate but it was clear that most of the children weren't there and we soon found out why.


Tomorrow, April 15th, was of course the celebration of the birthday of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung and today, out in the town square the students were having a celebration in song and dance. Our English tour leader asked the Korean guides if we could stay and watch some of it so we went out to the square where it was just getting underway and sat down on the floor, with the assembled crowd to watch. It was fascinating. It started with a group of teenagers dancing on roller skates accompanied by a full orchestra which, while not perfect was certainly quite amazing for school musicians. They were followed by the pupils of the school performing a great variety of dance routines, song performances - both solo and as a choir, an accordion group, acrobatics and gymnastics. And all of it was performed with a breathtaking degree of skill. And all of it was performed in front of the giant smiling beatific portrait of the leader in whose honour it had been conceived. We stayed there for about an hour, quite literally enthralled by it, until our guides insisted that we had another site to visit and needed to be moving on.


It was only later that a comparison occurred to me. In the film Cabaret, there is a scene where a group of people go out to a cafe and while they are there, members of the Hitler Youth perform the song "Tomorrow Belongs To Me". Beginning with a solo singer it mounts to a sinister and triumphal crescendo. It's one of the most chilling moments in the whole film, especially when Michael York remarks, as they are leaving, "Do you still think you can control them?"

DPRK: The Concrete Wall

The sense of reality though was rather quickly dispelled when we left the DMZ. We drove for some time through land that was more fertile than we had seen in the north and villages that were a little more substantial but the overall standard of living and the complete lack of modern farming methods (by which I mean from the last six centuries) was unchanged. We were on our way to something called "the Concrete Wall". One of our group was a political historian with a special interest in Korea and he had never heard of this edifice. Nor, it transpired, had anyone else on the bus. To give the DPRK viewpoint I will quote from another leaflet that I picked up.

"The Korean people are a homogeneous nation of the same blood that has lived for many centuries in the same territory, using one language.
Over their 5000 years of history, they have created a brilliant culture and enjoyed a harmonious life. However since the end of the Second World War, when US troops occupied the south area of Korea in 1945, the Korean people have been living in a country divided for over half a century...
...The concrete wall, which runs from east to west, was built by the south Korean puppet clique at the instigation of the US imperialists, their masters, in order to divide the nation into two for ever.
It is 5-8 m high, 10-19 m wide at the bottom and 3-7 m wide in the upper part., and fitted out with pillboxes, lookouts and other military establishments. It is 240 km long"

Before I give my opinion about the wall, let me continue for a moment to describe what we saw and the circumstances in which we saw it.

We drove away from the DMZ for around forty minutes and arrived at a car park in the middle of nowhere at the foot of a small hill. We walked up the hill into a dull and functional military-style building. Behind the building, in a dugout trench, a row of binoculars and telescopes were mounted on fixed tripod bases, looking out across a barren and empty stretch of ground. In the very far distance there was a road visible with some traffic on it. Halfway between us and that road was a stretch of what looked like wall, though it was hardly visible without the use of the binoculars and telescopes. Here and there were things that might have been military observation towers.
The details of the walls construction were explained to us and the evils of the American overlords who had demanded it made clear. Comparisons were made with the Berlin Wall.

There are, as even the most determinedly non-militaristic can see, a number of problems with all of this. First and foremost is that the question "who gains" is ignored altogether. Coming from the west and having taught English to any number of South Koreans I can state absolutely that I have never met a single one who wanted to be reunited with the North, especially if that meant giving up the high standard of life that they have now to join a regime ruled by such a dynasty and essentially hurl themselves back to a repressive feudalism. Whether they are right or not is irrelevant. It is in their interest to encourage defectors from the North, to make it easier, not harder, for such people to enter South Korea. (Of course the DPRK position is that everyone there is happy in paradise so there are no defectors, in the same way that they need no prisons because there are no criminals.)
Secondly there is the construction of the wall. It has, they say a north facing, vertical wall of up to 8m and a south facing sloping wall. In what way is this an effective fortification? Sure it would prevent the immediate advance of tanks from the north but it would also prevent the advance from the south. An eight metre vertical drop wouldn't be very easy to negotiate, would it? Then there is the manpower and the effort and the time that would have been required to build as opposed to, say, laying a minefield.
Of course there is that Berlin Wall comparison to look at as well. That was built by the East to keep their people in, rather than by the West to keep them out. This tends to be far more typical of such measures.


Then of course there is another set of questions to be asked. If it really is across the whole length of the border then why did we need a forty minute drive to get to it when we were already at the border? Truly I had no idea where we were. We could have been at the border of fifty km away from it for all any of us knew. We were also looking at it through binoculars from a kilometre away. It could just as easily have been made of polystyrene as concrete.
All in all there was nothing convincing about it, either in concept or execution, though it was rather creepy to hear the North Korean descriptions of it, delivered with every appearance of sincerity.

A brief note

A larger version of the DMZ panorama in the last post can be seen by clicking on it. It's well worth a look.

DPRK: The DMZ

You might think that the Demilitarized Zone would be another of the unsettling experiences of the tour, but in many ways it is far less so than the Memorial Palace or the Friendship Exhibition. For a start, it seemed to me to be much more honest. We had spent the whole morning driving along completely deserted highways; wide, well-maintained, perfectly straight routes that had absolutely no traffic on them. Long distance travel, it seems, is something that doesn't happen in the DPRK. I suppose, had I asked, I would have been told that when everyone is happy where they are they have no need to move. Given that I know that you need permits to travel in much of the country and special permits to enter or reside in the capital, I suspect the truth of the matter is rather more sinister.


We broke to stretch our legs and have a cup of tea at something that was a bit like a very small motorway service station. Only a bit like it as the staff had clearly set up five minutes before we got there and would equally clearly be shifting everything away five minutes after we left. We were the only people there. Hardly surprising as, as far as I could tell, we were the only people on the road. Almost everyone walked out into the middle of the deserted highway to take pictures. When would that ever happen on one of our major routes?
We arrived in the late morning at the DMZ and, after some formalities and hanging around, were driven down a narrow road - with clear points where concrete blocks could, at a moment's notice, be used to render it impassable - to the DMZ itself.


We've done the history lesson that resulted in the creation of this strip of land separating North from South, so we don't need to do it again.
Inside the DMZ you can see the hut where the armistice talks took place, a small and comfortable place; the larger, colder, less friendly hall where the agreement was signed (and an array of photographs and exhibits from the period); the Joint Security area where the actual border is marked by a line across the concrete the neatly bisects the group of blue huts that straddle the border.


You can actually walk around a table in the hut, under the watchful eye of the guards, thus entering South Korea and then re-entering North Korea. This is the one place that you can visit from both countries. (Or from the DPRK perspective, from both halves of the single country.)


A uniformed officer shows you around, explaining everything in Korean, for your guides to translate. He'll even let you take his picture, or pose with you in the one place in the whole country where such a thing is permitted.
There is a fine irony in the name DMZ, given that it is the most heavily armed border on Earth and given that, under their respective flags, the fortress-like buildings that face each other are clearly so heavily armed and protected.
Nevertheless, in its own brutal way, it is much more honest than almost anything else we had seen. Name aside, there is no real pretence here that everything would be fine if only the Americans would stop the brothers in the South from pursuing their desire to join with the North. This is a military base and nobody claims otherwise.

DPRK: Korean State Circus

As with many experiences in the DPRK there was a kind of hybrid Lewis Carroll-Franz Kafka feel to our visit to the circus. It began when the bus pulled up on a rain-swept, deserted car park in front of the large and impressive building where the circus is held. We were escorted in, into an foyer that was as large as any theatre I have previously seen. Once again the predominant building material was marble. Marble staircases swept up and down from this grand entrance. Those of us wishing to, ahem, use the facilities, after our long drive were escorted down one of these into the basement where the equally impressively built and decorated toilets had no running water. Once we had been escorted back up we were placed in a waiting room. This was a large rectangular room with armchairs lined up around the sides for us to sit on and portraits of the two leaders hung upon the walls. Why we had to wait there never did become clear, though a random assortment of Koreans and non-Koreans entered or left over the next fifteen minutes until finally we were led out, upstairs and into the auditorium. It looked like any other circus. There was a circular performing area in front of a stage. High above it in the roof were what were clearly trapezes. Rows of seats were banked steeply around one the side opposite the stage. We were led to our, rather good, seats. Strangely the place was very busy, if not actually full. I had seen no signs of life on the car park and could only imagine that there was another, less grand, entrance for the locals to use.

Soon the acts began. In many respects they were completely normal circus acts. There were wire-walkers, trapeze artists, tumblers and acrobats, trampolinists and trick cyclists and even a couple of entertaining and inventive clowns to fill in the gaps while the equipment was being set up or taken down behind them. There was one moderately unpleasant animal act involving performing bears but otherwise it was a well-performed and entertaining circus.
Except for one thing.
It was clearly the right place to use that phrase from the book.
“Sasang-yesulsong-i nopsum-nida.” – It is of high ideological and artistic quality.

Let me illustrate with just one example, the wire-walkers. They were a group of extremely skilled artists: racing along the wires – slack or tight – on foot or on unicycles, alone or in acrobatic groups. The wowed the audience with their practiced and flawless routines. So what was ideological about it? Well two things. First it was performed in front of a backdrop projection of glorious revolutionary workers building power pylons and the routine was clearly designed to mimic this heroic activity. The “workers” ran up the wires, erected imaginary pylons and generally created a spectacle of good comrades at work.


Other acts were performed in a similar way and in front of similar projections. One of the routines from the clowns involved two working men with a (styrofoam) telegraph pole. Another had the hapless, but honest, worker making a fool of the wily, but unscrupulous landlord.



When it was all over we were led back out through a busier foyer but into a still deserted car park.

DPRK: The International Friendship Exhibition

Note: photographs in this entry are taken from the International Friendship Exhibition tourist leaflet that I picked up at the hotel. Photography is strictly forbidden.

Less phony, though a good deal more disturbing was the Friendship Exhibition. This too has been built in the Mt Myohyang region, apparently because it was a favourite area for the Great Leader to spend time. As you approach by road you see what looks like two very traditional Korean buildings. They are no such things. They are a decorative front for an extravagant exhibition of gifts received by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. As befits his higher status we visited the Great Leader's bit first. Once we had passed the smart, unsmiling, armed guards on the door we handed in our coats and cameras (no photography is permitted), put cotton outer covers over our shoes and proceeded into somewhere that was every bit as overblown and bizarre as the Memorial Palace had been. Room after marble-lined room has been built into the side of the mountain, joined by marble lined corridors. In every room there are display cases containing the gifts. It's a bizarrely eclectic selection. There are statues made of every conceivable material from wood, to metal, to stone, to ivory, horn, Bakelite, plastic, glass. They are of every conceivable subject from revolutionary scenes to animals to abstracts to sports figures. There is furniture and there are costumes. There are cars and a train. There is a drinks tray made from a dead crocodile. There silver bowls and golden tea services. There are precious jewels set into ornate objects and precious jewels presented as if dug from the ground yesterday.

As you read the captions or listen to the guide certain things become obvious. As with the awards room at the Mausoleum, the greater and more elaborate the gift the dodgier the country it came from. Valuable gem-studded artefacts often turned out to be from the countries, communist or otherwise, with human rights records of the most appalling kind. There were, for example, several very large (not to mention illegally modern) ivory carvings presented by Robert Mugabe. Gifts from European nations tended to be not from Governments or Government figures but from individuals, business organisations or fringe left-wing political groups with tiny memberships. Official state gifts from western nations tended to carry an apparently unnoticed level of ironic comment. Gifts from the UK for example filled a single small cabinet and included the kind of "Present from London" souvenir rubbish that you'd be ashamed to give to your least favourite auntie, and a present labelled as being from "Ex-President and Mrs Jimmy Carter" was a cheap and nasty glass ash-tray.

Part of the way round there was another compulsory opportunity to bow to a wax effigy of the Great Leader. It was surreal. The lifelike effigy was at the end of a long room. It had been placed in a setting of artificial trees on a footpath that merged into the painting of the mountains on the wall behind. There was more of that vaguely stirring music playing, this time rather softly, accompanied by the noises of birdsong. Fans ruffled the faux-foliage with a semblance of a summer breeze. We duly lined up in front of this figure and bowed though, as one wit commented later, it was really more of a Mexican wave than a bow as such.

The tour was briefly interrupted for a cup of tea on the terrace where we could sit and contemplate what is said to have been one of the Great Leader's favourite views. We could also read one of his poems but either he was a rotten poet or he had a rotten translator because it was something most people would be ashamed to put their names to, full of clichéd, pompous phrases about the revolutionary spirit of the people.


More rooms full of more gifts followed until we were led back outside, across the car park and into the second building. Smaller, but similar it was devoted not to the Great Leader but to the Dear Leader. If anything his gifts were a weirder selection than his dad's. In addition to the statues and paintings and tapestries, the exhibition had more furniture than a branch of Ikea. There were radios and computers, cameras and telescopes. There was a Basketball signed by Michael Jordan and apparently presented by Madeleine Albright.
We rather rushed this second experience as time was moving on and we needed to get to lunch before taking that dull drive back to Pyongyang for our visit to the circus. We were hurried around it by our guides and were soon on our way.

DPRK: Poyohun Buddhist Temple

There were three things on the itinerary for the next day: The Poyohun Buddhist temple, the Friendship Exhibition and, after drive back to Pyongyang, the Korean State Circus, and all proved to be very interesting in their own peculiar ways.

First up , straight after breakfast was the Poyohun Buddhist temple.

There is no doubt that this was once an active and important Buddhist temple. It was founded in 1042 by a monk called Kwanghwak. Located in the Mt Myohyang region , it was partially destroyed during the Korean War but, though it was rebuilt after the war, I'd say that there is considerable doubt about what it is nowadays.
It certainly looks the part. I've been to plenty of Buddhist temples in my time and this, though fairly small, looks like any of the others. The buildings are the typical designs and with the typical colourful decoration. The place is calm and tranquil and photogenic and something about it feels utterly wrong.
We had been told that although the DPRK is an officially atheistic country there is freedom of religion but that only a small number of older people insist on maintaining any religious belief. I'd had my doubts about both parts of that assertion and, at the temple, I still had them. The trip's other Bob, a retired Canadian, put his finger on it. There were, as far as we could see, only four people present, the guide, one soldier in uniform, one woman in traditional costume and one monk in the familiar saffron robes. Looking at the last of these Bob mused on whether he was the "monk of the week", who would be back with his army unit next week replaced by someone else putting on an act for the tourists. I have no idea whether this was a fair assessment or not, he could have been pretending or he could have been genuine. It was hard to tell. Either way what was wrong was that at other temples I've visited you can see that they are active. There are lots of monks around. Bits of them, as with any building in constant use, are none too clean; the trappings of daily life are there. The monks are busy. This was different. It was too clean, too unused, too empty. The "monk" was just stading there, apparently with the sole intention of being on everyone's photographs. It felt like a museum. The effect was heightened by a visit to a newish building near the end of the compound where we saw an exhibition about ancient printing, the Koreans having had moveable metal type centuries ago. The guides stories about warrior monks who had joined Kim Il Sung in his fight against the Japanese also rang untrue, given what little I know of the principles of Buddhism.
To round off the “museum” feeling, here was a cafe and gift shop near the gate.

It was an interesting enough experience but it rang rather false. It felt like what it was: a showpiece for the tourists, an ostentatious cry of "see how free the people are"!

Woof!

This one seems to have passed me by so far; strange as it's such a fine example of how fast and how far television quality control has fallen.
Some time ago, in the TV series, Jonathan Creek there was a brief gag where Creek's boss, a minor celebrity magician, was appearing in a reality TV show where he and the other celebrities had to live in a sty, with pigs, as pigs. It was a satire on the idea of celebrity reality shows and was, presumably, the dumbest idea that the writer could come up with.
So imagine my surprise to discover that "My Life As An Animal" was commissioned as a real program. There are clearly no ideas so stupid, so ridiculous, so downright crass that they won't get commissioned by some channel or other.

Personally I want to see some of these ideas (end of the clip). Can't wait for the Monkey Tennis.

DPRK: Korean Lessons

After dinner, and a quick shower, I went in search of the bar and found a couple of our group in a room that didn't look much like a bar at all. There was a bar and a fridge tucked away in a corner and there was a pool table on which two of them were playing a very long and remarkably strange game, apparently inventing new rules as they went along. The rest of us were playing a different game - charades.
This started because we were trying to communicate with the young Korean woman at the bar and after a few false starts we developed the game as follows.
I had bought a phrase book in the Pyongyang Hotel. This is a quite startling publication called "Let Us Learn Korean". In addition to the usual "Hello", "Goodbye", "How are you" stuff, and the slightly more unusual "It is very Juche-oriented" and "Here is really a people's paradise" it includes such useful phrases as "Four seasons in Korea are relatively distinct from each other", "I don't eat pork, give me pheasant", "With the death of Comrade Kim Il Sung mankind has lost a legendary hero" and "It is of high artistic and ideological quality."
There are also no fewer than ten different variations on the theme of "Reunify Korea now!"

The way our game worked was that the barmaid would read through the Korean phrase and pick one and show it to one of us. That person would then mime the English phrase for the others to guess. Once it was guessed we tried to say the Korean and she tried to say the English. After a few false starts it went very well and we had a pleasant hour or so playing. Then the rest of the group decided to go off and do Karaoke. I would rather eat my own liver than do Karaoke so I stayed where I was and bought another beer. With just me and the barmaid left charades clearly wasn't going to work so we tried other English lessons of pointing at and naming things. I learned the Korean for hand, arm, face, hair, leg, eye, nose, mouth, ear, finger, chair, beer, glass, bottle and a few other words and remarkably I can actually remember them now. (son, pal, ulgul, mori karak, taree, dun, ko, ib, kwee, son-kara, kol-sang, maekju, cupu*, byong since you ask).
Then she got out her vocabulary book and I helped her with her pronunciation of various words in English.
Finally I noticed that it was almost one O'clock and went off to bed. It had been an odd day and a very mixed one starting with that bizarre visit to the Memorial Palace and finishing with an English lesson. Tomorrow also had a mixed itinerary planned, and one of similar extremes.

*This might be a local or slang version. I can find no independent verification of it.

In memory of an internet friend

There's a popular theory that friends from the internet aren't really friends at all. I subscribe to it myself. I've been heard to make disparaging remarks along the lines of "Anyone who says he has a thousand facebook friends means he has no real ones."
And I believe it, really I do. I mean those people I know by cryptic screen names from message boards and chatrooms, they aren't real people, are they? For them to be real you have to have met them. Self-penned profiles notwithstanding, they could be anybody.
The trouble is that I've had to do a bit of reassessment. Someone I have corresponded with on the internet, that I know solely through interacting with him through message boards and chatrooms, died a few days ago.
I found out about his death because a mutual friend, a friend who has actually met both of us in real life, was concerned that we hadn't heard from him recently and went to a lot of trouble to find out if he was OK. He wasn't. He was in hospital with terminal cancer. And then in a hospice. And then dead. And I felt just as much a sense of loss as if someone I see every day had died. But that isn't possible, is it? As I said internet friends aren't real. Obviously some of them are.
I've corresponded on and off with Jerry for a couple of years. I've found him to be, by turns, witty, wise, a great writer, a shameless recycler of old jokes and utterly incomprehensible. He's sent me some of his writings to read, and then, because I badgered him endlessly about it, some more. They had the style of a true raconteur, a man who knew who to pace an anecdote to perfection. He was also kind enough to say that he very much enjoyed my writing. I don't know if he ever actually finished reading the book that I made available on the internet but I know he'd read most of it, and commented kindly about it.
Of his life I know very little other than that he felt it had been full. He was widely-travelled, though now living in Hawaii. He had a great (if sometimes rather weird) sense of humour.

He was a friend. Just one I'd never met. And though it feels a little strange to be saying it about someone I knew only from the internet, I'm going to miss our chats. I guess internet friends can be as real as real ones after all.

Alices In Wonderland: Part 44

Some time ago in this series of posts I mentioned that I had intended to post an illustration from the edition illustrated by June Goulding but that her web site indicated that she'd rather I didn't. This week, to my surprise and delight, June contacted me and said that I could go ahead, that use of an illustration in a review should be OK.

The edition is from Parragon, published in 2003. (ISBN 1-40541-670-X) It's a nice hard back edition of the two books printed on glossy paper and absolutely packed full of illustrations. The text, thank goodness, is the standard Lewis Carroll version and the illustrations are bright, cheerful and colourful. It's one of my favourite modern editions. (My own favourite illustration? The feast scene at the end of Looking Glass.)

So. It's been a few weeks. Where were we in the story?

Alice had rushed off to the court for the trial. In the court she finds that the King and Queen are the judges, various other characters are the jury and the White Rabbit is the court herald, reading the charges and calling the witnesses.

DPRK: Arch of Triumph: Drive to Mt Myohyang

After we had been back to the hotel to change our clothes and have a lunch of the Korean delicacy of cold noodles that was so unpalatable that I was incredibly grateful that I couldn't manage to pick them up even with a knife and fork and was thus spared the need to actually eat them. Then it was onto the bus for a long drive out to the mountains where we were to stay for one night to give us a chance to go for a walk in the beautiful scenery, visit a Buddhist Monastery and Museum and then spend the following morning in the Friendship Exhibition.

We stopped off at the Arch of Triumph in Kaesonmun Square on the way to take a few pictures. It's quite an impressive structure which is 60 metres high and 52.5 metres wide. Once again I can quote from a leaflet picked up at the hotel.
"The Arch of Triumph stands in Kaesonmun Square... a historic place where the Great Leader President Kim Il Sung delivered a speech on October 14, 1945 upon his triumphal return to Pyongyang after he led the twenty-year long arduous anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle to victory"
While it may be impressive I would rather have turned my camera in the opposite direction to where a very large group of people were practising their singing and dancing in preparation for the Kim Il Sung birthday celebrations but when I asked permission I was told that I couldn't photograph people in the capital and so I had to content myself with the monument and a picture of a nearby stadium.



The drive to the mountains was through a drab, flat landscape that looked anything but fertile. Here and there, there were workers in the fields. They appeared to be doing everything by hand with no agricultural implements, however primitive. Only once did I see as much as a simple Ox-drawn plough.



We arrived in the late afternoon at our hotel, a strange looking pyramid shaped structure where we dropped our luggage and went off for that walk. The walk started out up a concrete road that soon turned into a wide dirt road. However before we had progressed very far we were forced to stop. After a conference with some men coming down the hill, our guide informed us that we needed to wait as there was blasting going on ahead. About ten minutes later there was an almighty explosion from further up the track and soon we were able to continue. The walk became steep. Parts of it followed the banks of a stream, others had had slippery steps carved into the stone. About half way up I stopped and said I'd wait. My knees were starting to ache a little and while that would make little difference on the way up I was anticipating the potential trouble on the way down. A couple of others stopped and waited with me.



Around half an hour later we were on the way back down from our short and, frankly, not terribly interesting walk. And an hour after that we were having another dinner in the hotel, this time rather more palatable than the lunchtime noodles had been - though still with bowls full of kimchee.

gobbledegook

As an English teacher I had to mention this.
Sadly I am familiar with almost all those abbreviations (including moodle). It would be interesting to know if any of my (few) American readers have any idea of what any of them mean.

TTFN

DPRK: Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery

From the Palace we took a short drive to the Revolutionary Martyrs' Cemetery which is located on Mt. Taesong. The cemetery contains rows of busts of soldiers who died in the liberation of Korea from the Japanese.

You approach it up the hill, with some members of the group being required to lay flowers, all the time surrounded by more of that stirring music from speakers mounted around the cemetery. A couple of quotes from a leaflet that I picked up in the hotel may give more of a flavour of the experience.



"The cemetery contains the busts of the anti-Japanese revolutionary martyrs who devoted their lives to the liberation of their country, to the freedom and emancipation of their people and to the victory of the cause of Juche."

"It was built in Juche 64 (1975) AND EXPANDED IN Juche 74 (1985) thanks to the warm affection of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il."

Surely a joke!

I'm watching a news item about the collapse of MG Rover. The former worker they interviewed was named Maurice Minor.

DPRK: A poem

A nod to the new God

The room is high, and long, and cold,
And there, in the centre, the coffin holds
The body of the country's God,
And silently across the floor
They approach him, four by four
To circle, genuflect and nod.
For all who see him there must bow
At feet, at sides, at waxen brow;
An act of worship, seeking grace.
They do not see that this is creed,
If not in name, then sure in deed,
To look upon the saviour's face.
So what is it, if not true faith
To sanctify the leader's wraith
With trappings of a holy writ?
Raise marble temples in his name,
Accord him immortal, true, acclaim
And to his memory submit?

DPRK:Kumusan Memorial Palace

Until now I had been finding the DPRK a little unnerving but not tremendously so. In any war, especially a war that ends indecisively, the two sides are bound to have different versions of events to tell. True, I didn't trust much of what I'd been told in the DPRK, but I have a deep distrust of my own Government's ability to tell me the truth. The war in Iraq when we were given several different sets of reasons for the invasion, all of which turned out to be false, proves that our leaders are perfectly willing to lie to us. So I accepted that the United Nations/United States version of events in Korea while probably more accurate than the DPRK version was likely to contain its fair share of misleading information and half truths. That's that "first casualty of war" stuff again.

So what, I wondered, would the situation at the Kumusan Memorial Palace, add to my understanding of the DPRK?
We all assembled in the hotel reception in our smartest clothes. The rules for the visit were clear. Smart clothes, empty pockets, no cameras, no outer jackets, no inappropriate remarks or humour, lots of respect.
At the memorial palace, which is certainly more of a palace than a memorial, there was a long queue of Koreans. It was clear to see that this was a place that everybody comes. There were groups of soldiers, groups of businessmen, groups of ladies in traditional dress. The queue was at least several hundred yards long. After a few minutes of waiting around, we were marched straight to the front of it and into the buildings. It felt a little uncomfortable but the people waiting seemed to accept it as part of the way things are. Inside we were led through what felt like miles of marble-lined corridors. Automatic devices cleaned our shoes, we were searched and X-rayed, more automatic devices blew the dust from our clothes. Periodically we were asked, for no apparent reason, to line up in three columns, or four columns, or two columns, or single file. As these groupings were inevitably shuffled into some new arrangement the only reason I could come up with was that it was simply to show us who was boss. From this enormous room we were led, this time in fours, into another equally large room. At the far end of it was a statue of Kim Il Sung. The tuneless but vaguely uplifting martial music that had been playing throughout the experience was louder in here. The wall behind the statue was lit with pastel lighting. It reminded me of something and for a moment I couldn't place it. Then it came to me. It was very like the statue of Christ that I had seen in the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. The statue, the lighting, the music were all designed to produce the same effect. From that room we were led to another, with another statue and this time we were given audio sets to listen to. It was very hard to listen with a straight face. If the rhetoric on the Pueblo had been overblown this made it sound restrained. Imagine someone with a deep voice, loaded with gravitas, perhaps Orson Wells or James Earl Jones, solemnly intoning "When the Great Leader was taken from us the hearts and souls of the people were filled with a great grief and sorrow and with one voice they rose up and demanded a memorial be built to honour his name."
Now imagine about ten minutes of it.
After another trip through a wind-tunnel to clean us up we were led into another hall, this time with a glass coffin at the centre in which the body of the Great Leader lay. We lined up in fours again and walked to the coffin, circling it and bowing three times to show our respect. After that there was a museum showing all of the honours and awards bestowed upon Kim Il Sung from leaders and universities of the world. Most of them seemed to be from dodgy Central African republics or other Communist countries. The dodgier the source the more elaborate the award. In another room we saw a bullet proof car and a train.


Afterwards we were led back through the corridors and out into the fresh air where we were allowed to retrieve our cameras and take a couple of shots of the outside of the building.
I had found the whole two hour experience deeply disturbing. They may say this is respect for a man, that this is politics, but I know religion when I see it. This isn't hero worship; this is plain and simple worship. It has the trappings and rituals of religion. It has a God figure. It has blind faith. It's a religion.

DPRK: Another brief history lesson

Hands up if you've heard of the Pueblo Incident.
No, me neither, but I'm not American and I was only eleven at the time so it's hardly surprising.

The Pueblo was a United States spy ship that was captured by the North Koreans on 23 January 1968. One crew member was killed in the action and the others were captured. They were held for eleven months. Eventually the United States apologised for spying and the captain signed a confession and the crew were released. After the release the US and the captain recanted their words. The Pueblo was kept by the DPRK who now have it moored in the river in Pyangyong and take tourists around it.

So much for the bare facts. There are all sorts of other disputed "facts". The US say that it was well outside DPRK waters, the DPRK say it wasn't. The US say that the crew were kept in bad conditions, endured torture and mock executions to make them confess and were generally mistreated. The DPRK say there was no torture, the crew were kept in good conditions and the confessions were genuine.

After our visit to the War Museum we went to see the Pueblo. We were shown around the ship by the same guide that we had had at the museum and given the North Korean version of events. It was a rather eerie experience that reminded me a little of the trip around a captured U-boat that you can do in the Science Museum in Chicago. They have done very little with the ship apart from painting red circles round every bullet hole and shell mark on the ship to draw attention to the effects of the battle. Every area of the ship is paraded to the public to show what the DPRK claim the Americans were up to. We saw the electronic surveillance equipment, the arms lockers, the gun deck guns, the code room and so on. We were also shown a video about the incident. It was actually quite hard to keep a straight face during this as it was delivered with a stirring musical background and an overblown pomposity that undermined the message it was trying to give. We would come across more examples of this kind of misguided rhetoric later. Someone really should explain to the people who produced these videos for them just why they would achieve a better result with a less theatrical style.

On the dockside there is also a glass case containing a spy-torpedo packed with electronic equipment, allegedly captured some years later.

After our visit to the Pueblo we were informed that our luggage was now in the DPRK and waiting for us back out at the airport. This meant that any other activities planned for the day would need to be abandoned while we fetched it all. I don't think anyone was too bothered by that, so we climbed into the bus, and drove out to the airport.

I'd been expecting a long-winded process but all we had to do was pick them up and sign for them and we were on our way. The drive to the airport took forty minutes, the drive back another forty and the actual collecting of the luggage no more than two. This meant that we had time to visit the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Monument as a coda to our day of military sightseeing. This monument consists of a large area paved in white flagstones with rows of bronze statues along each side depicting heroic military figures engaged in battle with the DPRK's enemies. At the end of the park is a large statue of another, single heroic figure. Unfortunately the pose makes the soldier look as if he is about to burst into a quick rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" which rather undermines the dramatic gravity of the memorial.

By the time we saw the memorial, twilight was falling and the park was empty and we could only spend a few minutes there before we had to hurry off to another meal, then back to the hotel for a shower and a change of clothes, and a couple of beers.
It was fortunate that we had our luggage back. Tomorrow we needed our best clothes, smart trousers and shirts, and - if we had them - ties. We were going to visit the Kumusan Memorial Palace, the Mausoleum in which Kim Il Sung lies in state.

DPRK: Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum

I'd been in DPRK for less than twenty-four hours and seen only three things, the Study House, the Folk Museum and a stamp shop. One thing was already clear. I'd be seeing a lot of portraits and statues of the Great Leader and his son, the current ruler, Kim Jong Il the Dear Leader. As we stood on the steps outside the War Museum I was willing to bet that as soon as we entered there would be another one.

We waited for the group to gather properly - the lunchtime restaurant being just across the street - under the watchful eyes of our guides. One of our guides asked us what news we had of the DPRK in the outside world. It was a tricky moment. The three pieces of news we had were that they had launched what was either a communications satellite or a missile, that they had arrested and condemned to ten years hard labour two American journalists and that they had expelled the United Nations inspectors. I told her that some newspapers had reported a satellite launch but others said it was a missile. Another member of the group maintained that it was a missile and that it had fallen into the sea. She was clearly offended. Subsequent western reports seemed to confirm that it was a satellite after all. With regard to the journalists and the inspectors neither she nor her male counterpart, when I spoke to him later, seemed to have any knowledge of either incident.


We went inside and sure enough the entire wall of the large hall was taken up with a mural of the Great Leader surrounded by victorious soldiers, happy smiling children and loyal workers. No surprise there then.
Also no surprise was the version of history presented to us over the next couple of hours. Roughly speaking it went like this. After years of colonial rule by the Japanese the Great Leader had led a revolution that had overthrown them (no mention being made of the World War taking place elsewhere.) America had then divided the country and placed a puppet Government in power in the south. Over the next several years tensions increased with the DPRK stoically resisting all the frequent cross-border incursions from the South without making any retaliation. Eventually the South mounted a sustained conflict which had to be met and the North crossed the border to fight on 25th June 1950. The Americans were outgunned and outclassed by the heroic DPRK forces and eventually, in 1953 were forced into an ignominious armistice which shamed them even though they still would not admit that they were defeated. In spite of this glorious victory the Americans managed to keep the country divided by suppressing the desires of the South Korean people to unify with their northern brothers. The North has subsequently spent decades on trying to offer plans for peace and reconciliation which would have been successful if not for the Machiavellian schemes of the United States.


We saw displays outlining the course of the war, from the DPRK perspective, displays of weapons - both those of the DPRK soldiers and those captured from the enemy. We saw rooms full of the twisted, wreckage of destroyed helicopters, tanks and aircraft. We saw recreations of the command centres and the underground tunnels from which they engaged the enemy.

Most impressive were the dioramas though of the eighteen that are in the museum we saw only two. One of these though was as impressive as anything that I have ever seen in a museum. A huge room has been used to create a three hundred and sixty degree vision of one of the famous battles of the war. The tricks of perspective used in the model and the stunning painting give it a remarkable realism. On my photographs it looks dull, lifeless and flat but the reality is different.

It was interesting to hear such a wildly different version of history and, frankly, the generally accepted version probably contains its fair share of inaccuracies, deceptions and downright lies. Hiram Johnson is generally credited as the source of the aphorism "the first casualty of war is truth". Whoever said it, it remains just as true whether you are on the winning side or the losing side.