All people walked, men in their dark brown Mao-style khaki attire and women in baggy pants and nylon shirts with flower decorations. School children wore red scarfs and walked as if marching. Without electricity, men fought the summer heat by keeping windows open and staying topless. Many waved at the air-conditioned South Korean tourist buses.
A small girl in rags digging in a roadside ditch stood awe-struck by the buses coming her way.
Closer to the border, North Korea built a propaganda village, Kijong-dong, with clean apartment buildings. But a kilometer behind it, low-slung, identical huts of cinderblocks and gray tiles clustered on hills shorn of trees. Sunken roofs were patched with plastic sheets.
Rust and decay
Army barracks were tidy and decorated with slogans, but their roofs were covered with rice thatch. The front-line fences carried signs of "High Voltage Electricity!" but lines were rusty or missing.
Old Soviet-built cranes stood abandoned and rusting. New Hyundai earth-movers, lent by the South, were doing all the work to build a cross-border road that will eventually link Seoul and Kaesong.
The fact that North Korea is allowing South Koreans to see the embarrassing foibles of its system shows its eagerness for economic help.
Newly built front-line billboards near concrete tank traps showed a cherubic boy and girl and exhorted: "Let's leave a unified Korea to our offspring!"
Expat's prices
At the end of the tour day, South Koreans found there was more than one price system in North Korea. One reporter bought a bottle of red ginseng whiskey for eight euros and hours later he found another shop selling it for just five euros.
When he complained to a North Korean minder who rode with journalists, the North Korean laughed and said: "Well, when the market nears the end of its business, you have to dump your unsold goods."
RSS