On the last night of our visit, we were taken to Pyongyang’s supposedly famous “Number 1 Duck Barbecue“. With one minor problem: the raw meat we were given to grill was not duck, but tasted suspiciously like beef (very surprising, given that beef would be much more expensive to rear).
Our table raised this to L, our tour guide, who insisted it was duck. “But it’s beef!” I persisted, showing him the fat …Continue Reading →
The tour brought us to Pyongyang’s War Museum, as well as the captured USS Pueblo. The Americans in the group were faced with the awkward position of listening to the North Korean guide at the War Museum (a pretty young lady) describe how Americans were killed or imprisoned, while showing us the maimed vehicles, helmets and other spoils of war. It was like a lion showing his pet chicken the skeletons of previous chickens he …Continue Reading →
We visited an elementary school in Pyongyang. One of the attractions was a “science lab” that featured rusted microscopes neatly lined up on lab tables. Each table featured a pencil box with 2 pencils of exactly the same length, and an untouched eraser. On the teacher’s desk were test tubes with broken bottoms, and an overhead projector with broken mirror plate. Dysfunctional details aside, it was similar to the science lab in my primary school, …Continue Reading →
We got to take a “rush hour” ride on the Pyongyang Metro, that was advertised as allowing us to see “real life” in Pyongyang. It started with us taking the longest escalator I had ever seen into the depths of the city; it was far longer than any of the escalators in Washington D.C. The sheer depth as well as the architecture it was clear that the Metro station was built to serve as a …Continue Reading →
One of the weirdest parts of the trip was visiting the Kim il Sung Mausoleum. It used to be his official palace till his death, upon which it was sealed and turned into a mausoleum. Upon entering, we surrendered our wallets, cameras, passed through an array of metal scanners, and then covered our shoes with special socks so as to not defile “sacred ground”. We then proceeded to take a series of underground travelators …Continue Reading →
One of the trip’s most “what the f***” moments was visiting a bowling alley. We visited Pyongyang Gold Lane, a full multiple-lane bowling alley that was (according to our guides) one of North Korea’s most popular weekend spots. What we saw was almost like a scene taken out of a 1970s American film: couples laughing, cuddling and kissing between turns, and in general being way too good looking and way too good at bowling to be …Continue Reading →
Our bus traveled along a wide and empty road, into Pyongyang. Our tour guide ran through the list of do’s and don’ts: no photography without permission, no photography from the bus, no wandering off from the group. The road from the airport to Pyongyang was occasionally punctuated by the rare truck or van; otherwise it was only our bus, its loneliness accentuated only by the sheer empty width of the road. An intermittent but constant …Continue Reading →
Took the opportunity to go to North Korea over Thanksgiving break. My interest in the hermit kingdom had been piqued over the summer: I met a guy in Boston whose parents had escaped in the mid-80s, and listened to their stories of life there. As a literature student in Junior College I had studied Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; it was incredible hearing their stories of a dystopia in real life, north …Continue Reading →
In a blink of an eye, 2 years have passed since I made the decision to switch out of Economics as a major. Since then, it has been a long path that has seen me unofficially switch majors 7 times, eventually returning to Computer Science, the major I had initially switched to.
On hindsight, it has been a pretty good decision. A recent New York Times article writes about the ugly job market that …Continue Reading →
Thought I should upload this. It won the best poster award, for our CS147 class on Human Computer Interaction.
Daniel Onggunhao (王君豪) is currently at Stanford University. I work at the intersection of computer science, design and the social sciences, to build stuff that can be used for social good.
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