[easong]

Whenever I got home from my previous vacations, my mom would say, disapprovingly, "Where are you going next, North Korea?!". I had a spare week this winter and thought that sounded like a pretty good idea. Also, it's an interesting place that's much maligned (rightly), and I wanted to see it for myself. It occupies a unique place in the modern international mythology.

To be honest, I didn't get a whole lot out of my visit. Everywhere I go, humans are pretty much like humans elsewhere. If you've been to another repressive third-world country and pay attention to posts like this, you have a pretty good idea of what North Korea looks like - its aesthetic form is just more extreme and it's trying to pretend to tourists that it's a second world country. My inner giant-statues fan was pretty pleased. I would say that it met my expectations going in. If anyone is ever in China and has a few days and a few hundred dollars to kill, I would highly recommend it. I wouldn't recommend making the flight just for the DPRK.

My personal takeaway is that I no longer like the hard-line stance against North Korea, don't think the sanctions are a good idea (I did going in), and would rather see them brought into the international community via the inexorable march of global capitalism. I suspect that isolating them only makes them more dangerous to the civilian population and more willing to lash out to the international one. (In other words, they behave like humans everywhere else in the world!)