My Holiday in North Korea Read Online Free Page 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