The British student who wants you to study in North Korea

RAEL’S COMMENT:

Wonderful! If you wish to have holidays in another country, go to North Korea! That’s the way to destroy the effects of the mega-rich owned medias promoting war!

North Korea frightens the world with its missile tests and threats of pre-emptive nuclear strikes. This is precisely why a British student thinks it’s time to try making friends with North Koreans – the people who live there – or at least to get to know them better, writes the BBC’s Eleanor Dunn.

“We’re so quick to label North Korea as ‘forbidden’, ‘closed’, ‘crazy’, ‘suffering’ – but I want to take away that barrier we’ve created, just for a minute, and shed light on North Korea at a human level,” says 24-year-old Benjamin Griffin.

Before his first visit four years ago his knowledge of the country had been limited to “one documentary and some YouTube clips”. So the package holiday with Juche Travel Services (JTS), an officially approved tourism agency, was an eye-opener.

“When I first saw Pyongyang in 2013, I was expecting an army of soldiers everywhere I went. It was as if I hadn’t seen them as real people,” he says.

In fact he saw people walking to work, shopping, eating, dancing in the park. Somehow normal life seemed surprising.

“The truth is, in the everyday life of a Pyongyang citizen, they’re not worried about how best to defeat US imperialism or how evil capitalism is. They care about, ‘Where am I going to go shopping today? Where am I in my job? Is my daughter going to get married?'”

The following year, as a 21-year-old, he went back to volunteer as an English teacher at Pyongyang’s tourism college.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40063510