Pyongyang, in the words of our guide, is a vast and flat land. But when I went to North Korea, I found that Pyongyang is not flat because the road is bumpy. But it's very calm, because there are no dazzling advertisements here, and there is no loud market. Some are just passers-by walking silently. When I first arrived in Pyongyang, I felt calm and clean.
Of course, the purpose of traveling to North Korea is not only to enjoy the local scenery, but I am more concerned about how the local people live. From the moment I entered, I began to pay attention to the life style of the people here. More than two hundred miles from Sinuiju to Pyongyang, crops are planted all over the mountains, and from the perspective of the korean rural people I have met, they look much thinner than our rural people. As for the life of the rural people in North Korea, as tourists, we have no way of knowing. Because you can't have the opportunity to live in the local countryside for a while and experience the life of the local people.
Most of our time in Korea is in Pyongyang, and we are also looking at the lives of the people of Pyongyang. Once, after lunch, I finally found the opportunity to sneak into a state-run store not far from our foreign-related restaurant. This shop is not a foreign-related shop that only collects foreign exchange, but a shop for ordinary local citizens. The store mainly sells some daily necessities, such as clothing, shoes and hats, hardware and electrical appliances, and stationery books. Everything seems to be available in the store, but the variety of each product is relatively single.
Daily necessities in the store are very cheap, such as pencil erasers, and the price is a few cents of Korean dollars. A mouthful of iron pots for daily use at home is also six or seven yuan. Consumer goods like watches, radios, etc., do not seem to be expensive. However, the price of clothing was slightly higher, and I saw a shirt with a list price of sixty dynasty coins. The price of a suit reached more than six hundred dynastic coins. However, the prices here are much cheaper than those of foreign-related shops.
However, the shops here are not goods that can be bought with money. You must pay with a ticket, for example, if you want to buy oil here, you need a fuel ticket. To buy beer here, you need a beer ticket. In the few days I spent in North Korea, I found it not easy to really understand the lives of ordinary North Koreans. First of all, we can't act alone in North Korea, and the north Korean people have a strong sense of self-esteem, they don't complain to tourists, they don't complain. The tour guide will only go out of their way to introduce their various achievements.