Trip to North Korea - review of an unforgettable journey (pt. 2)
I will start this entry with a little postscript from part 1 of my travelogue. After publishing that entry, I thought a little more about how I could make things even more interactive for you readers, and with the help of some software, I may have managed to do that. So for those of you with Google Earth, I have now included bookmarks in that previous article, which will show you satellite images of the places I visited (well, the ones I can locate, at least) in DPRK. And to make it easier for you guys, the list of places and relative Google Earth links from part 1 are just below:
Susan Airport
May Day Stadium
Fountain Park
Grand People’s Study House
Statue of Kim Il Sung at Mansudae
And with that out of the way, it is time to move onto part 2 of my trip. Thank you to everyone who sent me messages about part 1 - I really do appreciate every person who takes the time to read my writings 
online. Onto business. The hotel we stayed at was the Yanggakdo Hotel in central Pyongyang (Google Earth link ). If you go to DPRK, you will most likely either stay here or in the Koryo Hotel. This hotel is excellent and is on its own island! It has a 9-hole golf course, cinema, football stadium, casino, rotating restaurant at the top of the hotel (this is a recurring theme), and pretty much everything else you could want in the hotel grounds (so tourists wouldn’t be tempted to cross the bridge into the capital itself?). The hotel also has 47 floors and around 1,000 rooms. But the thing is, there were only around 25 people staying at the hotel, and in our tour group people were sharing rooms so at the most, 20 rooms would have been occupied. All our group were located on the 25th floor, and people were making frequent comments about what could possibly be on the other floors. As far as I know, nobody was brave/foolish enough to try and find out. Although the hotel was much akin to a ghost town, the rooms were nice and clean, and offered a great view of the city, including the Juche Tower. The photo to the right shows the view looking south from the hotel. In the foreground you can see the golf course, and beyond that the cinema and then football stadium. The bridge going off to the right leads to central Pyongyang.
My Lancer Evolution is here!
Well, after a month of having no car (being a pedestrian is not a good thing here in Okinawa; maybe you can pull it off in mainland Japan, where there is a decent public transport system, but not here), my car has finally arrived. I was so excited when I woke up on Monday morning and knew it would be arriving in a couple of hours - it was like being a kid at Christmas again. But at the same time, it was time to say goodbye to my loyal Mazda Carol. It’s driven me all over Okinawa, through fields getting to dive sites, and hardly given me a problem. I was a little sad to see it being dragged onto the truck, the front passenger wheel hanging off, but it was time for it to go. So it was goodbye Mazda Carol (sob sob) and hello Mitsubishi Lancer GSR Evolution (oh my…)
Trip to North Korea - review of an unforgettable journey (pt. 1)
Last night I was posting a couple of reviews of places I’d visited in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) online when I got a message asking me if I would be able to write a description of my trip, the places I visited and the experiences I had. I’m always up for fulfilling requests, and so I replied that I’d be happy to recall my DPRK trip. Please take into account that this trip was taken back in June 2005, and so a few of the minor details may be incorrect or information a little incomplete. I do have my travel journal at the side of my computer to help me, and will try to be as descriptive as possible.
First of all, and the question that many people ask me: Why the hell do you go to North Korea?! The answer is simple: I like to do things a little differently. Most people think a great holiday is sitting on a beach in Thailand for a week, burning themselves and getting hammered every night, waking up around midday etc. I would much prefer to see places and do things so that when I come back from my holiday I’ve got a feeling of accomplishment. I wasn’t really looking at holiday destinations when I was browsing the BBC news website and a story about DPRK’s nuclear ambitions when I saw a link entitled, Holidays in North Korea. In that article I read about a company called Koryo Tours and from then my interest rose hugely. This company, run out of a Beijing office by 2 British guys, arranged visas and did regular tours to DPRK throughout the year, during which you had the chance of visiting and seeing things most of the world will 
never see. This was right up my street, and I exchanged a bunch of emails with one of the guys, getting more information on the trips and what was possible (unfortunately no diving was allowed, by I did ask and they did enquire!). In the end, I settled for a 6-day tour of the country, flying into Pyongyang and coming back by train to Beijing. Not only would this tour include seeing some spectacular and rare sights, but there was also the prospect of going to see the World Cup Qualifying match between DPRK and Japan, to be played at the country’s May Day Stadium. This is the biggest stadium in the world, seating over 150,000 people. To put it into perspective a little, it is over twice the size of the Olympic Stadium in Seoul, South Korea.
Newspapers, graduation, and the joys of buying a car in Japan
Not too much to report since my last blog entry, but I’ll try and give you a small update or 2 on what I’ve been doing. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands this week as the students have been off since Monday. 3rd years have now graduated (more on that in a sec), the 2nd years are on their school trip to Singapore and Malaysia, and the 1st years are off because the teachers are all consumed with running and marking school entrance exams. Although we are a public school, we do have an entrance exam to get in. Got to keep out the rabble!!!
Right - first up is a little writing project I was given. Cast your mind back about 2 weeks and think about what you were doing. For me, I was having a standard Thursday at school with a fairly average workload on. Just before lunchtime, our principal comes over to my desk and starts talking to me. “David, you remember last year the English department made a newspaper?”. This was an English-language newspaper (entitled “The Koyo Sun”) 
project started by my former co-worker. “I would like you to make it again. (your co-worker) is very busy at the moment, so I would like you to make it. Is that OK?”. And you see, this is where I should have asked for more details about what I would be expected to do, rather than just saying “OK, I’ll give it a go” and thinking it can’t be that hard with some help from students in writing articles and some time editing them and laying everything out. In fact, if I started talking to students the next day, I could probably get an issue ready for the start of the school year in April. But it was never going to be that simple! “Thank you David. I would like the same amount (i.e. an 8-page B4 newspaper), and you need to complete it by tomorrow at 12:00″!!! I have no idea how he kept a straight face when he told me that, as he was pretty much asking the impossible. But I’m like a Jimmy Saville at my school and I was determined to “Fix It” for them!
America - Land Of The Free
Land Of The Free, originally uploaded by TwelveX.
Saw this photo while I was browsing a photo website and loved it. The composition is excellent as is the content, and I just wanted to share it with you. Don’t worry - this blog isn’t going to turn political and I am going to go back to diving as soon as I can get in the water again (the car is around about a week or so away), but until then I’ll try and make some interesting and entertaining posts. Let me know what you think.