on Sina BBS: a Chinese tourist eats in North Korea
Found this interesting account today, titled: This is how North Korean quality restaurants entertain foreign guests! It’s a series of photos and commentary on what really matters–what’s the food like in North Korea? Rough translation:
North Korea is the same as we were before the 1980s; the standards for receiving foreign and domestic guests are completely different. All of their restaurants are state-run, so if we don’t eat at a quality restaurant then it’s a special banquet room, and they’re all good local restaurants. The food can’t compare to China, but it’s very special treatment in the North Korean context. It can’t be called really tasty, but getting your fill isn’t a problem.
The first evening they arranged for us to eat at a 4-star restaurant in Pyongyang, the Western Peak. Eight or nine people to a table. When we got there they brought small dishes of chicken, tofu, pumpkin and beef, three dishes of each. That made it look like there was a lot, but there were really only four kinds of food. But each table had two bottles of beer, which was more than we had expected. After that each meal had beer, which is not often the case when taking tours in other countries.
A Kaesong “royal banquet” — the tableware is very pretty.
The second day we went to Kaesong, where we had lunch at a famous Koryo cuisine restaurant. We were served an ancient imperial banquet, and the tableware here was beautiful. In front of each guest was a perfectly arranged set of eight brilliantly polished brass bowls…Waitresses dressed in traditional clothing poured us each a glass of millet wine and removed the lids from the dishes to reveal eight different kinds of pickled vegetables.
The shops were fairly well stocked, but are mostly for foreigners. They have a ration system, as we used to have in China. If you don’t have enough grain you can get more on the black market. But we heard it is many times more expensive. It looks like as long as you have money you can take care of food and shelter. But here in North Korea, where the average monthly salary is 90 RMB, how many people can really fill their bellies?
Selected comments from BBS readers:
Why is there such a huge difference between North and South Korea? I can’t figure it out!
Because North Korea is like China — communist.
Can you tell us when you took these?
I hope the two countries can reunite. They’re one family after all. Mr. Kim Jung-il, please consider it.
Unbelievable…
It looks poor.
It’s a typical socialist country.
I wonder how people would have felt if they had seen these pictures when they were all shouting, “Socialism is great!”
You must have been watching too many South Korean teledramas! South Korea would swallow up North Korea, and our compatriots in northeastern China would be living under the sights of American rifles.
You think he’d unite? Old Kim wouldn’t give it up. North Korean people are starving to death and he still lives like an emperor!! Just like those years for us with Comrade Mao, who was going around saying he didn’t want a personality cult, didn’t want anything special, and yet he was the grandfather of it all!! Even emperors didn’t live the way he did. Really, I bet that in the Qing dynasty ordinary people dared to say what they wanted about the emperor. But during Mao’s time I guess you didn’t even dare say anything to your mother!!…
The fakes of South Korean slaves.
At the end of world war 2,the many of Japanese must went to the Japan as their homeland, but there was a large problem. It was Korean murder. The problem of Korean murder had been discussed by their relations of war which South Korean slaves joined. Like Korean war, and Vietnam war, and Nanjing conflict with Japan. Until the Korean war continued, the many of people which was regarded as a north Korean communist or their familiar relations were killed by South Korean army and officers.
South Korean military police had been killed their own nation’s for about 200000 peoples as “north Korean relations “for their fakes and US military forces had regarded as nothing had happened.
So South Korean slaves’s criminal had been varnished from their dirty plan and their fuckin history, but North Korean didn’t accept it. They insisted why the South Korean slaves’s criminal was not discussed to correct under the international conversation like the mass media and the world wide web.
And Vietnam war, South Korean slaves rape the prisoner of Vietnam’s females and children. And many of Vietnam’s orphans made by south Korean slaves had been appeared at that time.
But league of nations didn’t discussed this problem, and present this time, South Korean slaves behave as though nothing had happened about those problems.
One thing will becomes other things, the man of South Korean slaves’s criminal appeared the side of those war, but only a few people know what they were, and to regret to say, the many of American trust the south Korean slaves’s fakes and regard as their criminal as Japanese did until the present time. For example Yoko Kawashima had written the some novels which described the south Korean slaves’s rape the foreign females during the end of world war 2 ,but many of South Korean slaves try to destroy this novels for fear to appear the truth which their crime like rape, murder, stealing at the present time. And they made California congress erase those novels and the yoko’s story becomes not adopt their school books for fuckin South Korean slaves’s faking history in California. And the story has gone. It means that South Korean slaves made the fakes in the world history as south Korean slaves is goddamn innocence neither to blame nor to do and rapes the all of student’s brain of California at the point of destroyed their own history of truth by fuckin South Korean fakes.
The many of South Korean slaves who live in USA are so delight as their crime has gone, and the all of Japanese are becomes to blame, because all of South Korean slaves ‘s crime has happened for hate of Japan, and they think all of their hate only erase by crime which murder, rape, stealing at the all of the world. Even those things exists, to trust the South Korean slaves’s various fakes at the no warning is nothing more safeness than never at the view to know the truth. The all of South Korean criminal called burakumin in Japan who disguise the Japanese and use the Japanese name and language said absolutely only fakes, and sometimes they disguise the Japan and Japanese perfectly, and had been made the various criminal to rape and kill the foreign females since long time ago at the all of the world.
Never trust the south Korean slaves for your safeness and to search the their fakes like the fuckin tokai and dammn dokujima, you will get some kind of fragments of truth of history which destroyed by south Korean slaves rape the history of the world and brain wash. They are such the only inferior races. The only true history is never changed like the Sea of Japan and takeshima.
I hope the two countries can reunite. They’re one family after all. Mr. Kim Jung-il, please consider it.
Kevin
when should i expect a war from you?