Pyongyang Skyline
Pyongyang is North Korea's capital and showpiece. Americans are typically housed at the Yanggakdo Hotel, a property on an island that is an easy place to confine foreigners to. We were allowed to walk around the hotel grounds but were forbidden from crossing the bridge into the city when not accompanied by a guide. My first instinct was that the North Koreans might try to hide the city from our prying cameras and give us rooms with little or nothing to see, but the opposite was true: they made sure we were deposited in rooms with the best possible view. At first I was tentative taking pictures from my hotel window, but after a few minutes I relaxed. In a country as tightly-controlled as North Korea, I reasoned that there wasn't anything visible from my hotel window that they didn't want me to see.
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My first glimpse of Pyongyang as the sun comes up. The city's legendary mist was already out in full force. We checked into the hotel at night so I wasn't sure what our view was going to be until the next morning when I woke up.
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An eyesore or a thing of beauty? The (in)famous Ryugyong Hotel, which broke ground in 1987. Construction stopped 5 years later when the government ran out of money. It is by far the largest structure in North Korea, and if it ever gets completed it will be the largest hotel in the world.
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Pyongyang tour guides used to pretend the hotel didn't exist and never mentioned it to tourists -- despite the fact that it is simply too big to possibly ignore. But when relentlessly pressed by me, I finally got one guide to give me a target completion deadline: sometime in the year 2012.
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The view straight out my window. The twin-tower building is the Koryo Hotel.
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Closeup shot of the Koryo Hotel. We were hoping to get to stay there at least one night in Pyongyang since it's actually in the city proper, but we weren't surprised to find that we imperialist Americans were put up in the isolated Yanggakdo Hotel instead.
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The early morning sunlight showed a bit more of the city's grit than I suspect they wanted us to see.
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The view straight down, directly across the river from our hotel room window.
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Another shot from across the river. It was fascinating to watch typical North Koreans go about their daily business, completely unaware that I was watching. The store on the left is a vegetable store; the sign on the right says "grocery store". But I never saw anyone go in or out. I watched for a while through my zoom lens and the only thing that happened in several minutes was someone inside moving a chair to sit by the doorway.
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Pyongyang traffic is virtually nonexistent. Most locals seemed to walk from place to place. There were fewer bicycles than I was anticipating. For those not walking, there were plentiful regular buses, electric buses, and city trams -- all almost always packed with way more people than they were probably designed for.
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At least the city buildings weren't all the same uniform drab concrete color. You can see there are some attempts at color here.
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The colored buildings definitely look better from afar. As I would zoom in closer to random structures, they instantly looked more gritty, less complete (note the missing glass) and almost always under construction.
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A couple traditional Korean-style buildings thrown into the city skyline mix.
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The scene looks peaceful in pictures, but the boats dredging silt and rock below our hotel made a tremendous amount of noise and made it impossible to sleep in, not that we were given the chance to rest much anyway.
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Yanggakdo, or Sheep's Horn Island, is where we stayed in Pyongyang. This picture and the next few shots are taken from the 28th floor of the Yanggakdo Hotel facing in the opposite direction of our room. Thankfully there are ample windows in the elevator lobby area that allowed us to photograph things in all directions.
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The Juche Tower, monument to North Korea's Juche (Self Reliance) philosophy. Our guides took great pride in pointing out that it was taller than the Washington Monument. They seemed very disappointed that none of us knew how tall the Washington Monument was exactly, because they were clearly waiting to give us the stats on the Juche Tower to prove how much better theirs was than ours.
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I returned to our hotel window to gaze out at the city whenever I had the chance, whether it was early morning, mid day (like this shot), or night time. The city skyline always seemed to captivate me for some reason.
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Better colors visible in the middle of the day on our lunch break...
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For fun, I decided to set up a tripod on our window sill and take a picture of Pyongyang during the middle of the day (first shot) the exact same shot at night (next shot), and finally a third time at roughly five in the morning at sunrise. The Juche Tower is to the right, and off in the distance is May Day Stadium, the site of the Mass Games.
