Let’s just get right to the questions I’m sure are burning in everyone’s mind regarding the elusive North Korea. The place is creepy as fuck. That’s the only phrase that even begins to sum it up.  Every day is like being in some mixed version of the Truman Show and Stepford Wives, with the added bonus of never being quite sure if you might get nuked or thrown into a work prison. The people never smile, and even the children, what few we saw, march along in uniforms of the “Young Pioneers,” being trained to stay in line. Every woman wears heels and skirts no matter what; our 2 guides wore skirts, tights and heels daily despite the fact that we walked all around the city and its monuments in the freezing cold.

And wow does North Korea love their monuments. Every few blocks had a tower or statue in honor of a Dear Leader’s birthday or the “friendship” of some other former Communist power. While we visited most of them, we didn’t do the logical thing and walk from one to the next, no our tour took hours extra unnecessarily . We believe it was an effort to make the actually quite small capital city of Pyongyang feel vast, but our van drove us back and forth across the river at least 8 times a day, making the distance from the bronze statues of the leaders stop #1 and the Children’s Palace directly next door stop #12 of our day. [Ed. note: Our guides realized we figured this out when I emphasized I liked maps…and proceeded to verbally call out exactly where we were, where things were nearby and how far away they were as we drove all over the city…in a country where GPS devices are logged at customs. In retrospect, I should have played dumb.]

But again, without our beloved passports, we towed the line and went where they told us when they told us, we didn’t take pictures without permission, and we definitely never questioned why they build 20 new skyscrapers of apartments and an 8 lane road when the entire country only had 10,000 cars and the previous 40 skyscrapers of apartments sat dark and half vacant.

But I almost broke at the war museum. [Ed. note: fuck that place.]

We realized early on that our guides were giddy to have Americans in their care and kept up a continuous banter in the car and on walks about our country, their country, politics, our families, and our jobs. With fear of saying something against the propaganda, I played the silent type (shock to everyone, I know) and let my husband field the questions on our behalf…he is after all the reason we were in this mess! [Ed. note: My wrap up will have my thoughts on just how mentally exhausting the visit was…]

But walking around the war museum, listening to the “facts” and “proof” of the “US Imperialists” spies starting the war and was keeping their country separate to this day, I knew our flight home would not arrive soon enough.  Then the military guide singled me out and began to pry into how I felt to hear all about my country…was I sad? I could talk to her, her sweet demeanor contradicting the starched creases of the light brown uniform. Suddenly I was almost thankful for my lack of interest in history; I honestly didn’t know the “truth” of the Korean war and could just tell her I had learned a lot and try to get to the back of the group and find my husband again! Tomorrow we were going to the DMZ where I could only imagine the guard’s attention would be tenfold, so there was no way he was leaving my side again until we were safely back in China!