The Lost Country

Blog one on North Korea

I have spent about two days in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. I’m staying the Ryugyong Hotel. Over the course of these days I have felt privileged to be among the 2,500 American, Australian and English tourists to visit here since 1953. Due to the natural beauty of this mostly unknown country, I have decided to write a blog of my travels.

On the fourth day of visiting North Korea our two guides, who follow you relentlessly day and night, deemed us worthy enough to visit the famed Korean Massed Games. By the way, the reason you have two guides is because they like to see what you’re doing at all times and because they speak English and a lot of people in North Korea don’t. Anyway, back to the Massed Games - the Massed Games is just a stunning part of the bigger picture of the Arirang Festival. This is a festival made to represent what they call their “Esteemed Ruler” - Kim II-Sung’s - birthday. The Massed Games are a representation of the unity drilled into the general public of this single party state. It is the biggest single massed event of gymnastics in the whole world.
The opening scene of this event is 30,000 school children holding coloured cards each with its own image. They quickly change these cards to create new massive images. This is then followed by highly entertaining and very well choreographed gymnastic events. There was also sad side to all this colour and culture though. I struggled to comprehend that most of those performers (children from five and above) will have this as their job for the rest of their lives. They have no choice in this single party state. The people here don’t own anything - it’s as if everything we take for granted they don’t have. I don’t know why I brought this up, it just kind of makes me sad. Anyway, so far I have enjoyed my time here even though you do see scenes of poverty here every day and you are not really treated like you are wanted. However, it is very beautiful and I hope to write further blogs on my travels here in what I have started to call, 'The Lost Country'.

By Timothy Farnbach