Leaving Pyongyang’s grand architecture, showcase avenues and spotless public spaces for the unvarnished reality of North Korea’s countryside is a sobering experience. Despite years of sanctions and increasing international isolation, Pyongyang looks wealthier in 2018 than I have ever seen it in 15 years of travel to the North. [...] But once the train rolls past the industrial belt around the capital, it’s a story of grinding poverty that clashes with the official image projected in Pyongyang. — Calvert Journal
Berlin-based travel writer Tom Masters gets the rare opportunity of a train ride from the bustling metropolis (by comparison) of Pyongyang through the northern backcountry of the secretive nation across the border to Vladivostok in Russia: "Every station along the way is almost identical, with two giant portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hanging on its exterior, both smiling incongruously against the bleakness of their surroundings."
5 Comments
Looks pretty clean compared to Manhattan. No trash, no homeless.
... no food, no medicine...
Despite the fact that the US is the richest country in the world (per capita GDP is > 100 times higher than North Korea) we have:
> 30 million who are "food insecure" (which has officially replaced "hungry") and far more who are malnourished
> 35 million without health insurance and access to care
> 43 million who live in poverty (defined by standards established in 1960)
For comparison the entire population of North Korea is around 25 million.
There are also more obese Americans than there are North Koreans etc.
And so the reason why tens of thousands of North Koreans risk their lives to escape might be....?
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