For those who would like to follow North Korea on a more than casual basis, these sites are likely to be of interest:<p>* NK News (<a href="http://nknews.org" rel="nofollow">http://nknews.org</a>)<p>* DailyNK (<a href="https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php</a>)<p>And perhaps especially since this is HN:<p>* North Korea Tech (<a href="https://www.northkoreatech.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.northkoreatech.org</a>)
NY Times team did a great job of making this responsive. It works really well on mobile.<p>That said, this is best viewed on desktop on a huge monitor. It looks gorgeous. Really, beautiful job to their front end team, consistently delivering this kind of experience.
You do realize that everything in these pictures is thoroughly and carefully pre-selected and even engineered for display purposes, right?<p>(I was born in the Soviet Union. It is mostly unknown for Western people how much propaganda matters in totalitarian countries, and how little it has to do with reality).
I was always fascinated by cars in North Korea - what brands do they use? How do they get there? What do you have to do to drive one? Exactly how uncommon are they? Who fixes them, and how do they know how? If the supreme leader is driven in a Mercedes, how do they get the parts for it?<p>I come from Poland where during communist times cars were really hard to come by, you had to wait 10 years on an official list to be allowed to buy one, but people always managed to get by somehow. Most models were of course of Soviet production, but an odd western car would sometimes appear, imported through friends of friends of someone in the party. Obviously NK is completely different, but I still find it very interesting, and it's hard to find any information about this anywhere.
The empty freeway from the window was the killer shot for me. Imagine if you showed the average citizen there a picture of LA or even Beijing during rush hour.
Hey, I've been there!<p>I ran my fastest marathon ever while being tailed by the paddy wagon, suited up and bowed down before the embalmed body of Kim Jong Il, locked and loaded to shoot at chickens, and tripped out in psychedelic halls of mirrors in the DPRK - North Korea.<p>Here's how it all went down...<p><a href="http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-korea-and-running-the-pyongyang-marathon/" rel="nofollow">http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-kor...</a>
I am impressed that Pyongyang appears in Google maps
<a href="https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongyang/@39.0338528,125.6923056,13z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x357e1d28b1b75405:0x283ff682d04744d6" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongya...</a>
I was looking for the giant Ryuyong Hotel in the center of town.