Monuments don't cry

Only a few thousand people visit North Korea each year. In 2011, I had the dubious pleasure of spending a week in what must be the world’s most absurd country.

Your regular charter tourists don’t travel to the world’s most absurd country. Paradoxically, there isn’t a more charter-like destination. The chances for visitors to see or do anything without the omnipresent “guides” being a part of it, are as great as overweight is a problem in malnourished North Korea. Everything is planned and set up in advance by the regime. Explore Pyongyang on your own? Forget it. Talk to someone local other than the two guides? I don’t think so. Go to the restroom? Not without asking for permission. 

Museums and monuments are the most frequent sightseeing spots you get to see (they are also mandatory for locals). And the common denominator for these “tourist attractions”, in addition to their absurdity, is that they all pay tribute to the deceased but eternal leaders, Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il.

Due to the perpetually weak North Korean economy, the regime will do almost anything to get cash from the few yearly visitors (tourism is severely restricted so that the authorities are able to monitor all foreigners in the country). One of the money schemes is a brilliant business idea which involves selling the same items over and over again. When visiting a school in North Korea, you are encouraged (obviously you want to help) to buy pens for the children. Once the tourists’ buses leave the premises, the pens are taken from the sad children to be sold again to the next group of unsuspecting tourists. 

The same approach works perfectly with flowers for monuments. After tourists have put their blossoms at the foot of a giant statue of the eternal leaders, the arrangements are removed and returned to the seller. A consolation with this variant, is that monuments, unlike children, don’t cry. Or maybe they do. After all, this is the world’s most absurd country.