I found it hard to wake up when the morning call came at 6:15 am. We had been up quite late last night practising the performances for the school visit this afternoon, and the spa had certainly relaxed me. The reason for the early start was that one destination we had been told could not be visited became accessible through the efforts of our guide, Mrs Li, and we needed extra time to accommodate it.
We left our accommodation compound at 7:30 am after long negotiations about a bottle of water purchased by one of the students. Our first stop was about half way back to Pyongyang, the Chonsamri Co-operative farm.
There are two types of farm in North Korea. State farms operate such that the farmers are salaried employees of the government. Co-operative farms, on the other hand, allocate plots of land to working teams of 15 to 30 people who are paid according to the amount of work they contribute. Most North Korean farms are co-operative, which is perhaps fortunate as they are more productive than the state farms.
However, Chonsamri could not be called a typical co-operative farm. It has clearly been favoured by government investment and is regarded as a model farm. 1,000 hectares in size (600 ha of which are rice padis), and with a population of 1,000 people, Chonsamri was visited by Kim Il Sung on 85 occasions, each date being listed on a full wall display inside the farm’s own museum. The farm is clearly seen from the main Pyongyang to Nampo highway, being marked by a huge bronze statue of Kim Il Sung in the company of several of the farm’s leaders. Chonsamri was declared a model farm because its land comprises both hilly and flat land, and because of its proximity to Pyongyang, and as such, the farm has received very generous provisions of machinery from the government.
After looking through the farm’s museum, all nine rooms of which are largely devoted to Kim Il Sung’s visits and his brilliant on-the-spot guidance, we ventured out to the fields. The fields certainly looked productive and well maintained (even including kerbing and guttering on some of the concreted farm roads), which effective interculture comprising maize, beans and rice interspersed between each other. Our main destination was a monument in a rice padi marking the point where Kim Il Sung helped with transplanting rice on one of his visits. A nearby sign adorned the field with a fairly common slogan in North Korea’s rural areas: “Let’s do cropping using the juche method”, which as all North Korean farmers know, means using “the right crop, in the right season, on the right land”.
Having completed the farm visit, we completed the return to Pyongyang and headed the previously deleted destination, the Mansudae Art Studio. This complex, which employs about 4,000 artists, is responsible for producing North Korea’s art - mainly propaganda posters, sculptures and street mosaics. The buildings of the art complex were adorned with some stunning examples of their work, which whetted our appetites for the things to come. Unfortunately, all these key areas were off limits to us today, and we had to content ourselves with inspecting Korean painting (water colours) and oil paintings. Disappointed at not being able to see the posters being prepared, we have made arrangements to try and see some posters out of Pyongyang later during our stay.
The students used the lunch break to change into their national dress for the next visit, June 9th Secondary School. The school was visited by Kim Il Sung on June 9th (in which year I am not sure), and the school was re-named in honour of that event. We were welcomed personally by the Principal and some students, who had come to the campus during their August holidays specifically to meet and greet us.
After a short tour of the school that included the political education classroom and a room filled with stuffed animals (including even eagles and lions) for biology teaching, we headed to a classroom for an English lesson with students from the school. The school had arranged 20 buddies for our students, providing a one-on-one opportunity for our students to have free conversations and make friendships - both of which happened with great enthusiasm from both sides.
The focus of the lesson was “Pyongyang”, which naturally led the students into useful vocabulary such as ‘temple of juche’ to describe Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum, ‘pass away’ (rather than ‘die’) to describe what happened to Kim Il Sung, and especially useful for everyday conversation, ‘lie in state’ to describe the President’s current condition. As with previous visits, the free conversation was especially valuable, because it gave our students to speak on an unscripted basis with young North Koreans of their own age. They discussed many issues, such as homes, family, sports, interests, food and music, and many of the students exchanged addresses to maintain contact in the future. Unlike last year, I didn’t have the chance to be greeted by the stock sentence “hello, my name is X. I am a citizen of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and therefore I envy nothing in the world”.
After the lesson, we moved to the school’s auditorium for a concert. Students from June 9th Secondary School (almost all girls) performed some beautiful songs glorifying the nations leadership, after which they invited our students to join them in a reunification dance. To thank our hosts, our students then provided a series of performances for the local students - a South Asian dance, a demonstration of tae kwon-do, a performance of Abba’s ‘Mama Mia’, Chinese rope skipping, a Latin American dance, an Albanian communist song, a Japanese fishing dance, a French song, and a Chinese fan dance. Our students’ performances were excellent given the severe difficulties faced in sound quality, and the setting was great - the school’s auditorium stage, all under the big red and white Korean lettering that translated as “Arm ourselves with the revolutionary ideas of the President Kim Il Sung!”.
A planned soccer match was abandoned on the agreement of the two Principals given the extreme heat of the afternoon (the temperature was 36 degrees). The visit concluded with some short speeches and a presentation of the LPCUWC 2009 Yearbook to the Principal of June 9th Secondary School. And so, just a little before 4 pm, we said our surprisingly emotional farewells to our new friends and waved a very prolonged and sad good-bye.
Our final destination for today was the Mangyongdae School Children’s Palace. One of the successes, I believe, of the socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was these children’s palaces, where free co-curricular activities were provided to talented children after school. Sadly, most of these closed down as soon as communism collapsed, but they are still operating at full strength in North Korea. I had visited another children’s palace in Pyongyang on previous visits, but this was my first visit to the children’s palace at Mangyongdae.
Mangyongdae Children’s Palace caters for about 5,000 children each day, and the enormous scale of the building was breathtaking. We looked at a range of the activities available for the children, including volleyball, tae kwon-do, strategy board games, gymnastics, ballet, piano accordion, calligraphy and embroidery, before going into a large theatre to see an excellent series of musical, dancing and gymnastic performances. The children were sensational, coping brilliantly with several blackouts during the performances and performing to a totally professional and often breath-takingly high standard.
After a very long but wonderful day, we returned to the Yanggakdo Hotel for a lovely dinner in the Chinese Restaurant (but without any Chinese food). Fortunately there were no evening activities planned for today - fortunately because tomorrow’s wake-up call is scheduled for 5:45 am so we can make an early start for the DMZ (demilitarised zone) on the border with South Korea.
