{"id":4682,"date":"2017-09-12T21:17:54","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T04:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/?p=4682"},"modified":"2017-09-12T21:17:54","modified_gmt":"2017-09-13T04:17:54","slug":"conclusion-of-my-trip-to-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/?p=4682","title":{"rendered":"Conclusion of My Trip To North Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"

August 17, 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the good things about being on a group tour in the DPRK – you will never oversleep and miss your flight; they will find you and drag you down to the bus to transport you to the airport.<\/p>\n

For half of the guests, this was the last day in North Korea, the other half was going on an extended tour for two more days.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I had to do the budget tour.<\/p>\n

We all assembled down in the hotel lobby at 9 am; the ones in suits were going on the extended tour to visit the mausoleum<\/a>, the rest were leaving – hopefully without complications.<\/p>\n

I gave the two female guides a bottle of Jameson whiskey each.<\/p>\n

I said, “I was expecting two male guides, so I hope you can do something with this whiskey.”<\/p>\n

One of them said, “Oh, yes, we can. Thank you.”<\/p>\n

The other guide agreed.<\/p>\n

I was told by someone who is familiar with the tours that, “It’s sort of like being in prison; they can trade what they have for something that they need.”<\/p>\n

We said our goodbyes to the extended group.<\/p>\n

\"Yanggakdo
\nThe Yanggakdo International Hotel lobby.<\/em><\/p>\n

We boarded the bus to the airport and were off; our guide handed us back our passports and travel visas that they had kept for almost the entire trip.<\/p>\n

\"The
\nThe Dear Leaders on the way to the airport.<\/em><\/p>\n

The plane was actually a large aircraft, unlike the one we took to Pyongyang; the entire DPRK weight lifting team was on the flight going to compete somewhere.<\/p>\n

I said goodbye to Simon and my guides and I went to wait in line to check my baggage.<\/p>\n

My bag was three kilograms over the weight limit.<\/p>\n

I put my bag on the conveyor and the young ticket lady pressed a button that rolled my bag under an X-ray; two North Korean Army officers carefully inspected the X-ray image.<\/p>\n

They started arguing with each other – All I could understand was “Mak-chu… Mak-chu…” which means beer.<\/p>\n

They said something to the ticket lady and she asked me, “Are you bringing beer back to the United States?”<\/p>\n

Oh, fuck!<\/p>\n

I’m going to do hard labor for smuggling beer!<\/p>\n

“Yes,” I said.<\/p>\n

She asked, “How many bottles?”<\/p>\n

“Four.”<\/p>\n

They started counting.<\/p>\n

“Oh, and a bottle of soju,” I said.<\/p>\n

She translated to the officers.<\/p>\n

They laughed; she sent my bag through and printed my boarding pass.<\/p>\n

Simon was still around and I asked him what that was all about.<\/p>\n

“They are just curious what Americans bring back from their country; it was more of a curiosity thing,” he said.<\/p>\n

Now it was the time to pass through passport control…<\/p>\n

Just like when I arrived, I handed my passport and travel visa over a counter top to a set of eyeballs with a hat on top of them.<\/p>\n

There was a two minute delay as he did something behind the counter.<\/p>\n

“What is your name,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Jeff ….,” I responded.<\/p>\n

He looked at me, took my travel visa, handed me my passport back and buzzed me through the gate.<\/p>\n

My blood pressure returned to normal.<\/p>\n

Unlike the trip to Pyongyang, they didn’t seem to segregate the passengers; I sat right among the North Korean weight lifting team, even passing Koryo burgers and customs forms between them from my aisle seat.<\/p>\n

\"Back
\nWe landed back in Beijing without incident.<\/em><\/p>\n

Once in Beijing, I managed to travel the 18 hours that it took to get back home.<\/p>\n

Due to the time difference, on August 17th, I was in North Korea, China and the United States on the same calendar day.<\/p>\n

What I learned on my trip:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Going to North Korea as an American is really no big deal, as long as you obey their laws and customs.<\/p>\n

American tourists are the only interaction that some North Koreans get with their “enemy” – they grow up to hate Americans, but are very friendly and curious when Americans actually go there.<\/p>\n

They like money and gifts, but who doesn’t?<\/p>\n

There is no such thing as “arbitrary arrest” – their laws are strict and strange to us, but you actually have to break their laws for problems to happen.<\/p>\n

If you travel with a great tour company<\/a>, they will brief you on how to behave and what to expect; don’t go with a horrible tour company<\/a> that will string you along for a year and boot you off of their trip because one of their previous clients got arrest in North Korea.<\/p>\n

I also have a California accent and attitude; I was told just that by my travel companions – relaxed and humorless.<\/p>\n

When I told my Brazilian roommate Bruno about my psycho-ex who was Brazilian, he said, “Don’t blame that on Brazil, blame that on her being a woman.”<\/p>\n

Bring plenty of toilet paper when you go to North Korean and learn to squat when taking a shit.<\/p>\n

OK, my mission to North Korea has been as complete as I could make it… now I need to get back to diving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August 17, 2017 One of the good things about being on a group tour in the DPRK – you will never oversleep and miss your flight; they will find you and drag you down to the bus to transport you to the airport. For half of the guests, this was the last day in North […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,13,9,31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4682"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4696,"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682\/revisions\/4696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psychosolodiver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}