And so we had arrived. It was hard to understand where we really were at first. Hard to connect the dots. Only the more I realized where we were and what was happening, the less I understood. The first remarkable experience was to wait on a line in the luggage hall at the airport for several minutes while a bunch of German shepherds ran between our bags. They smelled everything. I was 17 and I did not understand why. It must have been a collection of smells of old underwear with fresh chinese toothpaste. It was freezing cold there. While the shepherds were doing their job to the nation, I decided to take some time to look around and to analyse my surroundings. It was a big silent hall. Too silent. Four guards gathered at the entrance and at the exit. We were a group of around 30 people. 30 people and no one had any expression or emotion on their faces. I looked up and saw the only two people smilling in the room. It was the portrait of the leaders of North Korea reminding us tourists of our destination, but reminding the north koreans of their eternal respect for their beloved leaders. Something they could not forget at any moment of their lives, let alone while they were being surrounded by many guards and their german shepherds. Later I learned that those portraits came in all sizes and were in all places one can possibly imagine.
The streets were so empty, but emptyness also seemed to be in everyday life. Life had a different pace there, as if time went by slower.
North Korea was like a white canvas. Completely white and somehow peaceful. I could paint that white the way I wanted. Capture the spaces, people and their everyday lives. But there was one thing I could not capture: the truth.
It happened many times. First, there was light. And then, suddenly, a blackout. There wasn’t a single light on. Just pure darkness. Not even light from mobile phones, since it wasn’t common that all people owned one. I had never experienced a moment such like that before. Over and over, the crowd kept cheering to make the lights go back. No one was frustrated or angry. It felt like it was part of the show. Or perhaps part of their lives. The blackout experience was the best act in the circus that night. It taught me more about North Korea than all the other acts together. After that day, I started being more attentive to how electricity was being used in the city and which places were illuminated during the night. It will probably not be surprising for you when I tell you that the palaces, enourmous monuments and statues of the leaders were one of the illuminated areas all night. If you were right to predict that, you might already have understood how this country works.
Everyone wants to know how it was to be a tourist in North Korea. I have the feeling that people often expect me to say something big and horrendous. But it is hard to remember if there was anything I didn’t notice or realized. My memories from that trip are not easy to access. They seem like a dream. Pieces of moments put together that make no sense. Not much of the reality of North Korea was a world I recognized and could compare with the one where I came from, but there is one thing I knew: people will always be people, everywhere you go. No matter what situation you find yourself in, with people around, there is always a chance for communication and humanity. It might not always be possible to communicate by using words or the same language, but a smile is a universal language that can be spoken in all countries, even in a dictatorship like North Korea.
North Korea can seem like a suppressive, enigmatic environment. But on this blank canvas of a white-wash forest, a piece of everyday life shows the colours of a human culture overlapping the blurred reality of an undiscovered nation.
So what is the conclusion I had of North Korea? Black or white? Good or bad? A white canvas or pure darkness? None. It was its colors. What I mean by that is that the things I remember are the good moments, the smiles from strangers, the nice conversations with our guides, and how the our noth-korean driver completely crushed us when we insisted he played bowling with us. This fact reveals more about what I tend to focus on during my traveling journeys and the view I have of the world than reality itself. I believe that what we focus on can have consequences on what we experience. I believe there is beauty and good things in every corner of the world, so I can find beauty and good things in every corner of the world. In conclusion, this trip taught me that you can find kindness, humanity and beauty even traveling in one of the most mysterious dictatorships in the globe, even in North Korea.
