What to Read – Inside the Hermit Kingdom Salon.com
…. the bizarre spectacle of the vacant Ryugyong Hotel (aka the “Hotel of Doom”) towering over Pyongyang…… If you went out on a moonless night in the years after the nation’s electrical grid effectively collapsed, the only way you could tell anyone else was around was by the coal of their cigarette burning in the dark. There’s the writing paper sold in state stores, made of corn husks that “would crumble easily if you scratched too hard,” so that people wrote on paper scavenged from the margins of newspapers. And then there’s Vinalon, “a stiff, shiny synthetic material unique to North Korea,” of which the fatherland was ludicrously proud. Vinalon takes dye so poorly that everyone’s clothes (which were mostly uniforms to begin with) were limited to drab grays, blues and browns…
…With the factories and electricity shut down, the air over Chungjin is pristine again, and you can see every star in the night sky. Doctors provide herbal remedies, but only because they have nothing else; furthermore, they are required to spend weeks camping out in the mountainous countryside, harvesting wild plants. Some resort to growing their own cotton in order to have bandages. Most North Koreans have never seen a mobile phone and don’t know that the Internet exists….
A cross between Shangri-La and Auschwitz, forever mysterious, untouchable, inaccessi…
