I arrived in Incheon and it took about 3 hours to get to my host’s place in downtown Seoul. The transportation wasn’t slow. It was just that it’s actually quite the distance to cover.
The view from my host’s roof
One of the first things I did was to go to Gangnam. I know it from the song, of course, but it’s actually just a district in Seoul, but there is a monument to the song.
I always had an odd desire to visit North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I like going to odd places, which is why I have visited abandoned missile silos, backpacked/hitchhiked around South America with no solid plan, and various other locations. Something about North Korea drew me to it—one of the most politically isolated countries in the world. It was hard to get in, and the sour relationship with the USA didn’t help.
While I was traveling the East Coast, I met up with my uncle. He was telling me about how he went to East Berlin when the wall was still up. He was telling me how wildly different it was, and how much it changed after the wall came down. I was resolved to go there, and I wished to visit North Korea before it changed, for the better or for the worse. It could retract into its isolation or open up like China did, and I wanted to see it before anything changed.
It turns out, it’s not actually that difficult to get into North Korea. You just need to go with a tour company. I did some research and settled on Young Pioneer Tours. We had exchanged some emails, but it was still odd to pay ahead of time without having actual proof that it wasn’t a scam.
Hesitantly, I paid the ~$1000 for the 6-day tour, and it seemed to be okay. I got a Chinese Visa (you can only fly into Pyongyang from Beijing, so I had to go there first), and I booked a flight.
The time finally arrived, and in the fall of 2015, I got on a plane and flew to Beijing.
