The Monument to the Party Founding is perhaps the most well-known monument in the DPRK. Everyone who knows anything about the DPRK has seen a picture of this monument.
The monument, as its name indicates, commemorates the founding of the Korean Worker’s Party (or KWP).
Our Korean tour guides took us to ride the Pyongyang Metro through the city. We were lucky enough to be able to stop at four stations, something which very few tourists have done before.
We went into the Metro at Puhung station.
On our way to visit the birthplace of Kim Il-Sung, where his family lived while he studied in China, our tour guide told us a story about him.
We start our tour of Pyongyang with a visit to the Mansudae (Mansu Hill) Grand Monument, which is overlooked by two giant bronze statues. Our tour bus dropped us at Mansudae Fountain Park at the foot of Mansu Hill.
While in the DPRK we were to stay in the Yanggakdo Hotel. The hotel is named for the island it is situated on, and it means “Goat Horn Island”. This name comes from the shape of the island, which looks like a goat’s horn.
Around a month ago I joined my good friends at Young Pioneer Tours on a trip I have been wanting to do for most of my life. I travelled to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (otherwise known as North Korea, or Best Korea).
A few years ago while passing through Manchester my girlfriend and she picked up Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter. It sat on our metaphorical bookshelf since and only recently I’ve gotten around to reading it.
The last part of our tour was to get a train from Lhasa to Beijing. It takes 3 days to get to Beijing which means spending 2 nights on a train.
There were a few other misadventures in Lhasa that probably don’t deserve an entire blog post dedicated to them. So here are three mildly amusing stories of things that happened to us during the last couple of days in Tibet.
