If I’ve blogged this URL before. I was doing some housecleaning in my work computer’s URL folder and found this. I’ve mentioned before to others about this article. It is a great read on North Korea and how seriously out of touch with reality it is. You think you’re reading a sci-fi novel about an Asian Big Brother/1984 world. I feel so bad for the people who live in this isolated country, some of them may live ok lives, but they have no interaction with many of the technologies, cultural events, and knowledge the rest of our global society has to offer.

Definitely worth reading:

This is Radio Pyongyang by Simon Bone

Some interesting excerpts:

It turned out we were both fans of Radio Pyongyang, North Korea’s shortwave radio station. Radio Pyongyang broadcasts in several languages, although the English service is probably the most entertaining. You need a decent receiver to pick up very much in Europe, and there’s often no signal at all, perhaps because of electricity rationing. (The power for the jamming transmitters that block South Korean broadcasts is never cut under any circumstances).

The daily English program always features the same two announcers, a man with a sort of 1950s Hollywood accent and a woman whose voice is always too distorted to be understandable. (After years of listening I still haven’t quite caught their names.) The news begins inevitably with the words “A telegram was received today by the Great Leader…” and goes on to berate the US imperialist aggressors, their South Korean puppets, and the Japanese warmongers; after which Radio Pyongyang turns to features, generally excerpts from the life of Kim Il Sung as a boy or his tender reminiscences about Kim Jong Suk. At the end of the show, there’s often North Korean pop music, the lyrics to which are easy to figure out if you happen to know the name of the current Great Leader.

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Our van pulled to a stop alongside a couple of other tour buses. Our guide spoke: “We will make a bow to the Great Leader, and afterwards you may take photographs.”

We waited for the Chinese tour group ahead of us to spend their quality time with the Suryong before we grabbed our cameras and started taking pictures. The guide reminded us: “If you take a picture of the statue, the whole man must be in the frame. No feet only. And no pictures from behind.”