Shannon’s Reviews > Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea > Status Update

I got lost on youtube watching NK documentaries the other night (the ones by Vice are good, it's surreal how much of NK shown to foreigners is fake) so I read a bit more. Some of this is so difficult to understand - not paying for food/clothes, "dating" someone for 3 years and only holding hands, a "black market" where grandmas sell vegetables. Crazy.

The clutter that you see in South Korea is entirely absent. There is almost no signage, few motor vehicles. Private ownership of cars is largely illegal, not that anyone can afford them. You seldom even see tractors, only scraggly oxen dragging plows. The houses are simple, utilitarian, and monochromatic. There is little that predates the Korean War.

A part of me would love to see NK in person. It sounds so surreal

There are no love hotels in North Korea. Casual intimacy between the sexes is discouraged. Still, I tried to pry gently about how far the relationship went.
Mi-ran laughed.
"It took us three years to hold hands. Another six to kiss," she said. "I would never have dreamed of doing anything more. At the time I left North Korea, I was 26 years old and a schoolteacher, and I didn't know how babies were conceived."

Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.

I've seen this before, but it still amazes me.

And now for something completely different.