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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/
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Visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlTOga-rTF4 for a six-stop ride on the Pyongyang Metro!
The Yanggakdo Hotel houses most foreigners, is on an island in the river and foreigners cannot leave the grounds unescorted. 9-hole golf course, international cinema that looks like a bunker, and a football stadium.
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Even a Christmas tree may serve as a symbol of the New Year in a country where all Christian traditions have been completely eradicated.
The mosaic marks the spot where Kim Il Sung made a speech after liberating the country from the Japanese.
There is, of course, no advertising anywhere, however all stations have newspaper on display.
(c) humanitybesideus.net. All rights reserved. Do not reuse without explicit authorization.
Visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlTOga-rTF4 for a six-stop ride on the Pyongyang Metro!
This photograph sits in a set, click on here.
View over Pyongyang towards the 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."
18-hole golf course spans 45 hectres (111 acres) and is located on Lake Taesong in Ryonggang County, North Korea. The Pyongyang Golf Course was completed in 1988
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평양대극장.
Opened in 1960, this monumental building marked a turn in North Korean architecture. Until then, most construction had followed Soviet design. The Grand Theatre with its tasteful combination of traditional and modern elements was the first building in "national style".
The theatre occasionally stages one of the five classical revolutionary operas such as "A sea of blood" or "A true daughter of the Party".
18-hole golf course spans 45 hectres (111 acres) and is located on Lake Taesong in Ryonggang County, North Korea. The Pyongyang Golf Course was completed in 1988
The only problem with this timetable was that the first half was in 'Pyongyang Time',
which was about 100 years behind the rest of the world.
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/