My Holiday in North Korea (5 page)

18. There is no need to account for lines or crowds, because no place is crowded, because no one is there. Okay, sometimes people are there, but it’s never one or two people or a small group of friends just casually hanging out talking or taking in the sights. It’s a flash mob, NoKo style. Say you arrive at a Funfair (one of NoKo’s extraordinarily depressing amusement parks), and there’s no one there. Within minutes of arriving, a huge swarm of people—usually hundreds—will suddenly arrive, always walking in lockstep, five or six people across and as many deep. And of course they’re dressed and look nearly the same, sporting the same decades-old clothing and hairstyles, many, sometimes most, wearing military or other uniforms. Your handlers may deny this is happening, even when you point to it while it’s happening. In such cases, deny their denial and continue asking
a lot
of questions.

People in North Korea walk in lines like this

And like this

19. Your handlers will take excellent and overbearing care of you. It’s their job. They are tasked with ensuring you have a perfect experience and that you leave loving the Great Leader and North Korea. Basically they are (not) paid to brainwash you. This makes your interactions with them complicated and difficult. As a fellow sentient being, you will experience profound feelings of sympathy and empathy, while simultaneously feeling annoyed and disgusted by their blatant attempts to ingratiate themselves. Your options are to not think too hard about their feelings, motivation, lives, future, and mental states and enjoy your time, or drive yourself insane and rack yourself with guilt. I went with the latter. I recommend the former.

20. And finally, every place in NoKo is dimly lit (if at all), so keep your cell phone handy.

It’s really dreadful, she muttered to herself, the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 3

THE KORYO HOTEL

I
am sitting alone in an enormous banquet hall inside the Koryo Hotel, waiting for someone to serve me dinner. I’d been directed to sit at table number eighteen in the center-right of the room for no discernible reason. This is where I am first introduced to what I will learn is the prevailing style in North Korea: fancy tacky.

The room is beyond garish, with terrible fluorescent lighting (somehow made worse by strands of something slightly resembling Christmas lights but not in the right colors, and a whole lot less festive) and tables dressed with clashing 1970s-hued, tuna-pink tablecloths, lemon-yellow placemats, and lime-green napkins—all of which are dirty. Overly dramatic, bellicose-sounding, anthem-like communist music blasts from speakers plucked straight from the 1950s. In the ensuing days I spend in North Korea, I will come to understand that (1) almost everything in North Korea seems plucked straight from the 1950s and (2) I will almost never not hear that music blasting from speakers.

My waiter arrives, and somehow we discover that we both speak Spanish. From then on,
hablamos en español sólo
. There are no words to describe how horrible his accent is, except perhaps 
horrible
—it was damn bad. And through no fault of his own, he keeps bringing me small plates brimming with food that is both indescribable and inedible. I’m a vegetarian, so I know that it takes a special talent to fuck up eight plates of vegetables. No longer hungry, I ask if I am allowed to take my “Large Beer” up to my room to drink. (You are automatically served one free Large Beer with lunch and dinner. However, you must ask, and pay, for water.) “Sí,” he replies with a smile that is both kind and genuine. My Spanish-speaking waiter will turn out to be my best North Korean friend, after Fresh Handler.

Life at the Koryo Hotel was like watching a Wes Anderson movie only weirder, and I was the star. Like the dining room, the rest of the hotel is decked out in decades-old decor that in its heyday was gaudy, chintzy, and ostentatious, and in the present day is dated, faded, and démodé. A little less dirt and a little more quirk and you might call the place kitschy, but the pervasive feeling of melancholy and doom that envelops the hotel made that ship sail.

I spent five nights in the Koryo, two of which were consecutive, all of which were in my assigned room: 2-10-28. When I left my room on, say, Tuesday morning, and there were four squares of toilet paper left, and one of the lightbulbs in the bathroom had burned out, and the soap had melted to a sliver, and half of my Large Beer sat atop the ungainly nightstand-cum-AM/FM-radio-cum-alarm-clock next to the bed, two nights later, when I returned, all would be exactly the same. Only another lightbulb in the bathroom would have burned out. By the end of my stay, there were no lights in the bathroom. All of the bulbs had burned out.

I asked Older Handler why it was that I was put in the same exact room each time we stayed in the Koryo (my handlers stayed in the hotel, too, even though they lived in Pyongyang) and why they didn’t freshen my room in between stays. Older Handler replied, “You can leave your suitcase for $25,” typifying the inane, illogical, insane, absurd, and/or evasive responses I’d receive to all questions, except when people would just plain lie to me instead.

That North Korea has widespread electricity shortages is well known and well documented, but there is still something truly eerie—and oddly hilarious—about stepping off an elevator onto a floor in pitch darkness. It’s too late by the time you realize. The elevator doors close behind you, and there’s no going back. It’s just so damn dark. Your eyes don’t adjust, and you can’t find the button to summon the elevator. It’s abject blackness.

Unprepared the first time, I stood there in the dark, laughing at what a caricature of itself NoKo is, as I searched my bag for my flashlight—a.k.a. my cell phone, which was useless otherwise, save for the 
Kaplan Vocab for GRE
 app that required no internet or Wi-Fi to work. (I learned 169 new words during my trip.) And because it feels like I’m bullying NoKo if I point out that there was no consistent way to unlock my door using the electronic key, which often left me standing in the pitch-black hallway, cradling my phone under my neck as I tried inserting the key in every possible direction until somehow the door magically opened…well, I won’t do that then.

The gift shop in the Koryo Hotel lobby—which is really more of a bodega that also sells ugly clothes—provided my primary sources of sustenance: milk-chocolate bars and bottled water. It also, inexplicably, sells large pieces of frozen fish, which I often thought about bringing up to the register as a joke. But since I was already doing America no favors with my behavior, I refrained.

One day when we were driving around Pyongyang, I noticed a modern building that looked inhabited on an island in the middle of a river. (Rule of thumb I came to realize: dilapidated, old building = real building with actual DPRK inhabitants; modern, new building = fakery built to make NoKo look normal.)

“What’s that?” I asked innocently.

“Hotel,” Older Handler snapped.

I pressed on, a lamb to the slaughter, “How does that hotel compare to mine?”

“Yours is fine,” she barked back through her conversation-ending, tight-lipped smile.

I realized at some point during my second day that everyone was always wearing a pin with one or more of the Great Leaders on it. At first I thought it was just the handlers, drivers, and other people interacting with tourists, but no, it’s all DPRK citizens except for children, who are not considered citizens until age seventeen. (When I asked Older Handler what you’re considered from birth until age seventeen if not a citizen, she responded, “a child.” Fair enough.)

Fascinated by a law that requires citizens to wear pins depicting their dead leaders (albeit dead leaders the people believe are still ruling the country posthumously) at all times, I peppered Older Handler with questions about what would happen to you should you be unwilling or unable to wear your pin. The last round of our lengthy and rather useless exchange went like this:

ME: Okay, but, what if your house caught fire, and when you ran outside to save yourself, you forgot to put your pin on first?

OLDER HANDLER,
being deliberately obtuse
: I don’t know such a day.

Victory, hers.

One afternoon the elevator guard stopped me from entering the designated tourist elevator. Since he was the same elevator guard who was always there, and I’d stayed in the hotel three nights already, and been up and down the elevator a million times, and was clearly a tourist—not to mention there were maybe twenty-five tourists total staying in the hotel that week—I’m pretty sure this guy knew I was a legit guest and was just fucking with me. Nevertheless, I showed him my key as proof.

He refused to budge. He just stood there, arms crossed. I was in no mood. Without a second thought, I gave him a look that said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” while accidentally saying aloud, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Whoops. So I added, “C’mon dude, I have to pee.” Without saying a word, he stepped aside and waved me past.

Victory, mine.