Into North Korea,
Hot summer,
North Koreans lined up to buy popsicles,
Most people can't afford watermelon!
On a recent trip to North Korea, which was scheduled for one summer, our group flew directly from the capital, Beijing, to Pyongyang. It was already the afternoon of the day in Pyongyang, and the weather was extremely hot, and at the airport gate we saw many people pushing bicycles and selling popsicles, who were not organized by state-run shops, but self-employed people. The rapid development of North Korea's tourism industry in recent years has made some North Koreans choose to "go to the sea" to do business.
In the beginning, they may not have much money and experience, and can only start from the most basic things, so selling popsicles in the summer has also become the choice of many self-employed people. It can be seen that the popsicles are packed in a large box, and the popsicles are also covered by a thick quilt, which looks similar to the preservation method of selling popsicles on the mainland in the eighties and nineties of the last century, I don't know how it spread to North Korea, no wonder more and more people in North Korea come to this nostalgia, there are practical reasons.
At Pyongyang Airport, we then boarded the North Korean tourist bus, and along the way to the airport and hotels, we saw many of Pyongyang's summer-related elements. In the summer on the streets of Pyongyang, most of the beautiful women in Pyongyang wear black hip skirts and white shirts, which look very delicate, and there are other Pyongyang girls who look very coolly dressed, but they are all able to meet the level of discipline cadres who can check whether the pedestrians are dressed.
General discipline cadres strictly require Pyongyang citizens to have skirts that are not lower than their knees, and as long as they are above their knees, there is no major problem. Similarly, in Pyongyang, whether large or small, children, men or women, they are either on their way to eat ice cream or on the way to line up to buy popsicles. Around North Korean schools, we saw students lining up to buy popsicles, which is rare in China today.
It is worth mentioning that after the North Koreans buy popsicles, the torn bags are not thrown away immediately, and even if they are thrown away, they will not be casually thrown on the ground, so that our group of tourists saw dozens of North Korean students buying popsicles in just 2 minutes, but none of them littered. Seeing the enthusiasm of North Korean students to eat popsicles, we offered to get off the bus to buy popsicles, but the tour guide refused, and later learned that the popsicles sold on the streets of North Korea range from a few cents to a few cents, and these popsicles are mainly sold in the market and will not be sold to tourists.
If tourists want to buy, they can only go to foreign-related stores to buy, and later when we passed foreign-related stores, we spent "huge sums" to buy a 4-dollar popsicle. Finally, to our surprise, in the hot summer, state-run shops and roadside stalls obviously sell large watermelons, but no one buys them. Later, I asked the tour guide to learn that the main reason was that the price of Watermelon in North Korea was too expensive.
Take a watermelon of about 15 kilograms as an example, which sold for tens of thousands of Korean dollars in North Korea, equivalent to about 70 yuan, which is almost equivalent to the salary of ordinary North Koreans for a week. Therefore, in North Korea, ordinary people buy watermelons according to pieces, and divide a large watermelon into thirty or forty equal parts, so that a piece of watermelon is only 2 yuan, and many North Koreans are still willing to consume. After reading what you have seen and heard in the summer in North Korea, I think you must have been deeply touched by the summer before the 1980s of the last century, and share the past of the summer relief in that year!