Trip to North Korea
Day 8
Tuesday
18th August 2009
Trip to North Korea
Day 8
Tuesday
18th August 2009
Day 8
We all stayed up far too late last night, sharing experiences and reflections of the great adventure of the previous week. Thus, waking up this morning was not very easy, especially given the early hour of the morning call - 5:45 am. A quick look outside the window revealed a grey, overcast and wet day, the first rain we had seen in North Korea. If it had to rain on one day, then the day we were leaving was the ideal time. Without wishing to be melodramatic or excessively poetic, the grey weather matched our sombre moods as we were leaving an often misunderstood country that we hoped we had come to understand as much as was possible within the all-too-short period of just one week.
Each morning at the Yanggakdo Hotel, we had enjoyed a buffet breakfast in Dining Hall Number 2, a high ceilinged, cavernous cube of a room. We had come to know several of the staff, notably “Sales Woman No.6” (as she was identified on her name badge) who had learned that I liked my instant Nescafé with one teaspoon plus a bit of creamer (no milk was available, let alone decent coffee), and the older man (with no name badge) who I nicknamed Flipper (despite the unfortunate association with a dolphin) who cooked omelettes to order and served them onto a plate by flipping them high into the air from the frying pan to spin around and land on the plate in his other hand with perfect aim, followed by a glint in the eye and a slight grin that I translated as “I’m good, aren’t I!”.
In our short time in North Korea we had seen and experienced many aspects of the country, learning as we did so that the image portrayed in the Western media was at best superficial and incomplete, and at worst deliberately distorted. The North Koreans have a story to tell, but it seldom reaches the outside world. Hopefully our students can provide the balance that is so often lacking - as I said to them, when they return home, they will be the most interesting people they know!
My students were sensational ambassadors for the United World College movement, drawing glowing comments for their politeness, perceptivity, and enthusiasm everywhere they went. I almost ran out of my name cards because so many people that we met from various countries around the world decided they wanted their children to apply for UWCs on the basis of seeing and talking with the students. Of course, the toughest breakthrough will be the DPRK Ministry of Education, but by the time you read this they should have received my written proposal to discuss establishing formal links. When, or if, I ever receive an answer to that letter is something that no-one knows yet, but when I began the initiative to establish links between UWCs and the DPRK in 2005 I knew it would be a long and slow road to travel.
Many people we spoke to were much more open than in previous trips about the difficulties they had faced in the 1994 to 1999 period, the so-called ‘Arduous March’. They openly acknowledged that “many” (no figures known) people starved and died because of the combined impact of the fall of supportive communist regimes elsewhere in the world, the US-backed sanctions and a series of alternating severe droughts and floods. Rather than being an embarrassment as it is usually portrayed outside the DPRK, the Arduous March seems now to be seen as a triumph of self-reliance. While many commentators in the West predicted that the difficulties would bring down the regime, especially as it coincided with the leadership change following the death of Kim Il Sung, the Arduous March seems to have seen the regime emerge with its reputation for building ‘unity of will and purpose’ stronger than ever.
Our flight to Beijing was on the same Ilyushin Il-62 that brought us to North Korea a week ago (P-881). As only a handful of Il-62s are still flying, it is inevitable that we will have experienced one of the last scheduled Il-62 flights in the world; time will tell how close it was to being the last. I was pleased to see that after last year’s absence, the infamous Koryo burgers had returned to the in flight menu. These are moist, almost soggy burgers with a thin slab of some kind of unidentifiable meat that have been famous for decades. And it was a great nostalgic experience to be rained upon during the flight, as the white clouds of cool air pumped into the cabin by the old Soviet air conditioning system condensed on the metal roof above my head.
We landed in Beijing right on schedule at 10 am, reversing the time change of one week earlier by advancing four decades in real time as we wound our watches back one hour.
To see a gallery of photos of Day 8, click HERE.
Tuesday, 18 August 2009