Word: pyongyang
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...nuclear test and the resulting international outcry, the detention (and subsequent release) of two U.S. journalists for illegal entry, a spat with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (described by a Pyongyang official as looking like "a pensioner going shopping"), serious food shortages. On the face of it, 2009 appears an unlikely year for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K.) to woo more visitors. But according to British-run, Beijing-based Koryo Tours, a company that has been escorting groups of visitors to North Korea for 16 years, such a push is under...
...spite of negative media attention, the [North Korean] tourism market shows annual, if slow, growth," says Koryo's general manager Simon Cockerell, who points out that while thousands of tourists visit Beijing daily, a mere handful pay a trip to Pyongyang, just 90 minutes by air from the Chinese capital. (See pictures of Beijing...
...five-day schedule for a recent tour to the D.P.R.K. (my second, the first being in 2007) was packed tight with sightseeing. On arrival in Pyongyang, our coach whisked us from the airport to the Arch of Triumph, an imposing stone monument commemorating domestic resistance to Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century. At 200 ft. (60 m) high, it is willfully more immense than the Parisian Arc de Triomphe on which it has been modeled. Around its base, the scene was almost as it was two years ago. The 10-lane boulevard cutting through...
...North has long derided South Korea's "decadent foreign culture and ideals," and has banned nearly all South Korean, American and Japanese films in favor of 1960s Soviet and Chinese films rife with revolutionary ideas. Foreign films are allowed to be shown in some contexts, such as the Pyongyang International Film Festival held every other fall, and in recent weeks state television has occasionally shown Disney films like Snow White, Cinderella and Robin Hood. But a wide selection of foreign films have always been available to the country's élites, having been smuggled in before the 1990s, though never...
...popularity of South Korean TV shows and music known as the Korean Wave. On the black market in North Korea, American DVDs go for about 35?; South Korean ones go for $3.75, because of the higher risk of execution for smuggling them in, according to two recent defectors from Pyongyang. The nation's films and dramas have become so widespread across North Korea that the regime launched a crackdown this fall on North Korean university students, the movies' biggest audience, and smugglers at the Chinese border, charging some with promoting the ideology of the enemy state. "The government is terrified...