That Time We Went to North Korea

North Korea, or the DPRK has been in the news a lot lately. And of course, it's not all good. What we see is scary, threatening, dangerous.


While we don't negate any of these things, because let's face it, when your leader is a narcissistic, nuke-happy child (sound familiar? anyone? 'Merica. We're talking about 'Merica.) it's not going to be the best place to live.

But here's the thing. People do live there. Many many people. And they are mostly very good people. They are not dangerous, hateful, or malicious people. They are good people, living their lives the best they can with the information that they have.

In April of 2015, we went to North Korea to participate in the Pyongyang Marathon. Here is a random Google image search of that day that also includes us:

Please ignore the face. It was candid.

Along with the running, we toured around a few cities for about 10 days. The experience was really something else. And we could go into detail about the lovely people we met, the teens that wanted to practice their English with us, our guide who was funny and intelligent and loved to swear in English. We could go on about the positive experience.

But everytime we do we are met with people who refuse to believe that anything was real. We are told that everyone is an actor, they only show us what they want us to see (but hello, have you ever take a tour anywhere? That's normal. No group tour will take you to the slums or the ghetto or the less than impressive parts of town. Duh.). We've been literally told that we are now "tools of the propaganda" because we said we enjoyed our time in the country.

So instead of writing about it, we'll let you see it. The following video of course does not include every aspect of moment of our tour, but it does perfectly capture the feeling of our time in the DPRK.