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The Metro station buildings are all of the same 1980s vintage and have a distinctive, easily recognisable style. The Metro has two, very deep, lines and runs elderly trains that started life on the Berlin U-Bahn.
Reuben's North Korea Trip 2015
Read more about it here: bit.ly/ben_dprk
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© 2015 All rights reserved. All photos are owned by Reuben Teo Jia Chyau. For permissions to use, please contact him at reubenteo@gmail.com
After the Arirang performance.
rirang is held in May Day Stadium in Pyongyang for almost two months each year in September and October. The stadium holds 150,000 people, but due to the nature of the spectacle only about 40,000 seats are available for the audience. It starts at 8pm and lasts for 90 minutes.
Arirang is reported to have 100,000 performers including a card section of 20,000 students. The card section is essentially a giant display of 20,000 human pixels that is capable of split second changes.
The other 80,000 performers are beautiful women, soldiers, young people, gymnasts, singers, muscians, acrobats, or children as young as four or five. They are not paid for their performance.
Ryanggang hotel, Pyongyang, DPRK
I found a working outlet for my battery charger...
humanitybesideus.net/2012/12/01/a-review-of-the-six-star-...
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Reuben's North Korea Trip 2015
Read more about it here: bit.ly/ben_dprk
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/reubenteo
Like me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ReubenTeoPhotography
© 2015 All rights reserved. All photos are owned by Reuben Teo Jia Chyau. For permissions to use, please contact him at reubenteo@gmail.com
April 2012 trip to DPRK, North Korea for the 100th year birthday celebrations for Kim Il Sung - check out my North Korea blog at americaninnorthkorea.com/
A model of the Ryugyong Hotel in the Three Revolutions Exhibition, Technology Hall, Pyongyang.
It's what happens when big boys get charge of the town planning toys and there's no residents committees to whinge about potential traffic issues and the old oak tree by Mr Caslake at Number 43.
The Ryugyong Hotel September 2011.
Which will be the world's tallest hotel, only one year from its completion date....
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North Koreans revamp 'world's worst building'
The Independent. Friday, 18 July 2008
by Jon Herskovitz in Seoul
A hotel in Pyongyang once described as "the worst building in the history of mankind" is back under construction after a 16-year break.
According to foreign residents, the Egyptian conglomerate Orascom has just begun refurbishing the top floors of the pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel, whose 330m (1,083ft) frame dominates the skyline of the capital of North Korea, which is one of the world's most reclusive and destitute countries.
The firm has put glass panels into the concrete shell, installed telecommunications antennae – even though the North forbids its citizens to own mobile phones – and put up an artist's impression of what it will look like. An official with the group said its Orascom Telecom subsidiary was involved in the project, but gave no details. The hotel consists of three wings rising at 75-degree angles capped by several floors arranged in rings, which are supposed to hold five revolving restaurants and an observation deck. A creaky building crane has for years sat unused at the top of the 3,000-room hotel in a city that tourists are only occasionally allowed to visit.
"It is not a beautiful design. It carries little iconic or monumental significance, but sheer muscular and massive presence," Lee Sang Jun, a professor of architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, said.
The communist North started construction in 1987 in a possible fit of jealousy at South Korea, which was about to host the 1988 summer Olympics and show off to the world the success of its rapidly-developing economy. A concrete shell built by North Korea's Paektu Mountain Architects & Engineers emerged over the next few years. A proud North Korea put a picture of the hotel on postage stamps and boasted about the structure in the state media.
According to intelligence sources, the then North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, saw the hotel as a symbol of his big dreams for the state he founded, while his son and current leader, Kim Jong-il, was a driving force in its construction. But by 1992, work was halted. The North's main benefactor, the former Soviet Union, had dissolved a year earlier and funding for the hotel had vanished. For a time, the North airbrushed images of the Ryugyong Hotel from photographs. As the North's economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s, the empty shell became a symbol of the country's failure, earning the nicknames "Hotel of Doom" and "Phantom Hotel".
Mr Lee and other architects said there were questions raised about whether the hotel was structurally sound, and a few believed completing the structure could cause it to collapse.
It would cost up to $2bn (£1bn) to finish the Ryugyong Hotel and make it safe, according to estimates in South Korea's media. That is equivalent to about 10 per cent of the North's annual economic output. Bruno Giberti, the associate head of California Polytechnic State University's department of architecture, said the project was typical of what has been produced recently by many cities which were trying to show their emerging wealth by constructing gigantic edifices that were not related in scale to anything else around them.
Mr Giberti, when asked about Esquire magazine's comment about the hotel, said: "If this is the worst building in the world, the runners-up are in [Las] Vegas and Shanghai."
One of the best coffee shops in North Korea, located right next to the Pyongyang Hotel. For more on coffee in North Korea, visit uritours.com/blog/entry/coffee-in-north-korea-pyongyang-h...
April 2012 trip to DPRK, North Korea for the 100th year birthday celebrations for Kim Il Sung - check out my North Korea blog at americaninnorthkorea.com/
The guy in the middle of the picture was pointing and shouting at me to stop taking pictures, so I took a picture of him as well!