An early evening light cast a soft pall over Pyongyang’s muted grey apartment towers. In the streets, pedestrians vastly outnumbered the occasional packed bus or car. Hundreds waited patiently in single file at the bus stops. No emotion registered on the faces of those waiting, neither impatience nor exasperation. At a traffic light, another overburdened antique bus had broken down. Some ten men were pushing it. The rest of the commuters sat inside, seemingly oblivious that getting off would lighten the pushers’ load.
The wide boulevards were scattered with hundreds of people. They walked around, squatted on pavements or thronged the main square where thousands of people marched up and down, some holding pikes, rehearsing for September and the anniversary of the DPRK’s founding.
“Are these people rehearsing for the celebrations?” we asked. “Yes,” came a curt reply. “Can Americans attend?” “No.” Dusk crept over a concrete barricade of tall buildings. In the fading light, the streets teemed with hundreds of people. Later, I stood watching the scene from my hotel room that was filled with electric light. But outside my hotel room not a single lamp was switched on in any street or apartment block, a result of the chronic electricity shortages.
Our hotel was on the verdant grounds of an island in the middle of the Taedong River that bisects Pyongyang. We dubbed it Alcatraz and were discouraged from trying to leave unescorted after one such attempt ended at a guard-shack with the sound of dogs barking beyond. From my bedroom on the 31st floor I could just make out the opposite river bank. Ranks of labourers shouldering spades walked in single file in the streets at the end of their workday. Clusters of gendersegregated groups squatted on the verge, lectured by erect orators. Others huddled against corners, faces to the wall, urinating. There were no glass panes in the windows of the decrepit, Soviet-style blocks. If this was a showpiece city, the mind boggled at what the countryside must look like.
Yet North Korea is supposed to be in the middle of an investment boom. Increased construction activity in Pyongyang, an upgrade of the country’s underperforming electrical power plants and an overhaul of the antiquated rail network are all signs that change is coming. In December, Egyptianowned Orascom Telecom will officially inaugurate North Korea’s first commercial mobile phone network, a projected $US400 million investment spread over three years. North Korea’s stealthy opening to business is all part of an ambitious plan launched late last year to transform the national economy by 2012, the centennial of late leader Kim Il-Sung’s birth. Ground has already been broken on a commercial street in downtown Pyongyang that will feature a 50-floor hotel, a trade centre, a modern department store and offices.
Our visit wound up at one of the city’s elite department stores. There, listless saleswomen loitered around stacked shelves. An entire section was filled with sleek white washing machines, dryers and flat-screen TVs produced by Haier, a low-cost Chinese white goods company. The saleswomen outnumbered customers in the echoing halls and there was little sign of commerce. In the food hall, refrigerated display cases were stacked with bottled water, beer, canned foodstuffs and other imported luxuries far beyond the purchasing power of this famine-wracked country’s average citizen.
“Is this an expensive area?” I ask of our minders. “No,” came the inevitable reply. “In Korea, all areas are the same.
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