Last day in DPRK - back through the Iron Curtain

This is my last blip from North Korea finally posted today (almost a year later).  I chose today's blip (taken through the window of a moving train) as so characteristic of what one sees and feels in the DPRK: drab colours, a drab existence, people waiting to unlock their individual and collective potential.  The extra blips highlight people too - images of whom are generally hard to capture in North Korea (one needs to be very discreet, or have a very long lens, or be on a moving train ..).

Today we took the train back to China from Pyongyang.  We were handed back our passports before we left for the station and we bid farewell to the guides on the platform. Everyone was a bit sad to say good-bye as Miss M and Mr. K (and Mr. P the driver) have been good company.  No photos allowed in the waiting room the attendant informs us, a final reminder of reality here. There is a large group of high school children marching back and forth on the station platform in practice for a coming event.  People marching, marching, here, there, everywhere, is a constant in the DPRK. The train moves at slow speed.  It takes five hours to travel the 161-kilometer stretch to the Chinese border; apparently the tracks are not in great shape.  The landscape is pleasant, farmland and fields of wheat. No livestock though (I never saw a dairy cow that week). As everywhere, we pass people walking and cycling.  Occasionally, we see an old truck every one of which appears to be painted dark green.  At the border, customs officials flip through the images on everyone’s cameras as a final inspection. The inspection is good-humoured and half-hearted. The old bridge over the Yalu River, destroyed during the Korean War, stands as a tourist attraction to Chinese tourists.  Crossing the new bridge takes about 5 minutes but in reality it's an eon in time.

In Dandong, we have about 90 minutes as we wait to board the high-speed train, which travels overnight to Beijing.  There's a huge statue of Mao in front of the railway station.  His arm is raised pointing the way to somewhere or something but is now ignored amid a literal cacophony of visual and broadcast commercial advertising. The North Koreans traveling with us (including a team of sportsmen with "North Korea" in English on the back of their track suits) don't seem at all awed by the contrast to where we've just come from  The coach is open plan, 3 bunks high, so it's all quite 'communal', but a pleasant experience in its context.

My five days in North Korea was an amazing experience and one that continues to resonate through my mind one year later.  As tourists, one is of course exposed to only a very narrow slice of life in the country; there is no spontaneous contact with local people, seldom even eye contact. Nonetheless, for the perceptive, one is able to form so many insights.  North Korea is a country stuck in a time warp, in the 1970s. Somewhere I read a description of the ambience written by another tourist as "an eerie sadness" which I think is accurate.  There is an ever present drabness, seemingly constant marching formations, pride in the mundane ('what do you think of our metro system'), the bizarre homage being paid to the bizarre narrative that is scripted around the 'Leaders' ('we were very lucky to have them'), a people trapped in a mostly manufactured history, and in constant readiness for a contrived state of war. As I noted in an earlier blip, it is impossible to say how sincere ordinary people are in their belief in the system and its rituals. My guess is that as this is the only system they know, most simply go along with the flow.  Contemplating anything else is anyway a potentially lethal option. Nonetheless, coming away my overwhelming and most lasting impression was of smart, hard-working, disciplined people, a great human potential.

If there is to be any hope of integration into the world the country will need to open up communications.  'No reunification without reconciliation' as the saying goes. How they do this without the edifice of 'Juche' crashing down is anyone’s guess; exposure to the internet (for example) will end the system in weeks.  There is no way that outside reality can co-exist with the internal propaganda.

Incidentally, I was asked to do a presentation on my travels in the DPRK in Moscow a few months ago.  One of the questions from the audience was about parallels to the reunification of West and East Germany.  I subsequently read up a bit about this; one of the key features which helped reunification was the fact that more than 80 percent of the East German population were watching West German TV (illegally or not, but ignored by the authorities) by the time unification happened.  Effectively, through this form of communication, they ‘knew each other’ and the eventual integration was consequently that much easier.  A very interesting article here: Why German Unification Is Not a Model for Korean Unification.

A final remark.  At one point during the trip, one of the guides asked to look at my phone. "You have a lots of apps", he remarks, "That must be very expensive". No, I tell him, they're all free.  How's that possible that they don't costs anything, he asks.  I tell him that app developers usually make their money from advertising linkages.  What's 'advertising', he asks.
So a long way to go but great potential!