Free Sample
The Purple Culture Guide to North Korea
What you’ll actually see, feel, and need to know before you go
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Impressions
First Impressions
The first thing that gets you is not the monuments. It is the quiet. You step out of the airport and you have heard so much, read so much, braced yourself for so much, and then you are just standing there in the pale spring light with an empty four-lane highway in front of you. There are no billboards in the Western sense, no strings of traffic, no ambient hum. A few old cars roll past, mostly taxis and state vehicles, and the air smells like coal smoke and damp earth. For a country that occupies so much mental real estate in the world, it feels remarkably still. That stillness is not emptiness exactly, but it is the first thing you notice, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.
You are also surprised, almost immediately, by how clean it is. Pyongyang is not just tidy; it is swept. There is no litter on the streets, no graffiti, no peeling posters. The sidewalks are wide and paved, and the boulevards are lined with trees that look deliberated over. Locals in their weekend clothes walk slowly, often arm in arm, and they do not look at their phones because there is no signal for most of them. Instead, they look at you. Not rudely, and not with hostility, but with a quiet, penetrating curiosity. You are a rare animal in a very well-kept zoo, and you feel the attention of the keepers more than