Word: koryo
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...turned in my application in September, and two months later I was in Beijing, where I plunked down $4,000 in cash for the 10-day trip. The next day my fellow travelers and I received our visas and boarded a Soviet-era Tupolev plane belonging to Air Koryo, the national North Korean airline, for the two-hour flight to Pyongyang. We had no itinerary because our trip was considered "secret" information at that point. After landing, we were asked to hand over any cell phone, computer with GPS, radio and video camera?all forbidden from that moment forward...
Afew years ago, Chris Devonshire-Ellis, a Beijing-based business and tax consultant, was in the bar at Pyongyang's Koryo Hotel when he ran into another foreigner. "The guy's name was Vlad," Devonshire-Ellis says. "He'd come from Moscow on a train to sell tractors to the North Koreans. He had all these guys around him. Turns out, they were his team of bodyguards. The North Koreans paid him in cash--1 million in U.S. dollars--and that's why he needed the bodyguards. He was comfortable doing business with the North Koreans. He said they always...
...idiosyncrasies and erratic behavior overshadow the more mundane lives of his 23 million subjects. So it's a bit of a surprise to realize that Kim's name isn't mentioned at all in the 280 pages of James Church's impressive North Korean thriller, A Corpse in the Koryo. The dictator and his father, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, are in passing alluded to as "our great Leaders", but to Inspector O, a gruff cop from the Ministry of People's Security, they have all the influence of distant planets...
...work, flirts with telephone operators and fends off the elderly widows in his apartment building who want to hitch him to a suitable bride. Just as Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko detective novels stripped the cold war thriller of much of its ideological baggage, A Corpse in the Koryo is, in many ways, a street-level look at life in the Hermit Kingdom with nary a mention of mass games or nuclear weapons. "Anyone bold enough to try to discuss the North in nonjudgmental terms inevitably has felt the need to first establish a protective bubble of morally clean...
...originality and beguiling observation, A Corpse in the Koryo has the air of having been finished in a hurry. Inspector O's measured voice carries the story superbly up to its breathless climax, but in the end, some parts of the puzzle fit too neatly together while others don't fit at all. Major characters also disappear suddenly from the scene and with barely any reason. Church excuses this as art imitating life, explaining: "If you deal with the place, (and more to the point, if you live in the place) you learn to accept a great deal of uncertainty...