Overload, pt. 1

Where to begin? The past two weeks have been strange and fun and emotional for a million different reasons, but I'll try to start from the top and work through them. Bear with me.

North Korea: scary, fascinating, indecipherable. I didn't know much about the country going in, and I feel like I left it knowing even less. It was a one-day tour to the town of Kaesong, North Korea, with a population of 350,000 people, apparently. I want to stress the ostensible nature of the population count because, to my inexpert eyes, the town was considerably smaller than North Bay, Ontario, which has an estimated population of 70,000 people. Even if we assume every residence in Kaesong is crammed to the brim with occupants (not an unreasonable assumption, perhaps), it still seems unlikely to get anywhere near the stated total.

I'm focusing on the population figures here, not because they're necessarily all that important in and of themselves, but because they show one of the problems inherent in visiting "The Last Stalinist Regime" in order to learn about it: you have no idea what's true and what's not. In addition to Kaesong, we also visited a small Buddhist temple, at which we saw a Buddhist monk. Since I was under the impression that all religion is banned in the country (Kim Jong-Il and his father, Kim Il-Sung, are the only worshippable entities), however, I asked my (South) Korean tour guide about it, and he confirmed my suspicions, saying that the "monk" was actually an actor there to give the appearance of freedom of religion. Interesting, no?

It's difficult to infer too much from one day, but here are some other observations/speculations:
-all the North Koreans we saw were very thin, likely a consequence of the famine of the late 1990s, early 2000s, in which hundreds of thousands- if not millions- of people are said to have died.
-other than our tour buses, the government cars escorting them, and a few army vehicles, we saw almost no motorized transport at all. A few people had bicycles, but the vast majority of North Koreans seem to get around exclusively on foot, not that there would often be much cause for them to travel distances that require anything more than that.
-due, no doubt, to the scarcity of motor vehicles, the air was crisp and clean.
-we saw very few businesses at all. A movie theatre, a department store (with two or three articles of clothing in the display window) and a barber shop are all that come to mind right now. It's most definitely not a country operating on an open capitalist model, not that that should really surprise anyone.
-It's a scary place, not that that should really surprise anyone either. At the border, returning to South Korea, the guards checked everyone's digital cameras to ensure nobody had taken photos of things they shouldn't. I had taken a couple of pictures of a traffic cop and some of private residences- these were deleted from my camera. By not even the wildest flights of imagination could these have been construed as security risks or containing sensitive information, yet the guards acted as though I had taken compromising picture of Kim Jong-Il himself.

Recommended reading: The Aquariums of Pyongyang. Chol-Hwan Kang spent 10 years in a North Korean prison camp before being released. He later escaped to South Korea, then wrote a book about his experiences. Check it out.