By Alek Sigley, Tongil Tours founder and postgraduate student at Kim Il Sung University. Most days when I get hungry you’ll find me eating the perennial local favourite and specialty Pyongyang cold noodles (평양랭면) for either lunch or dinner. For $1 USD per bowl (in the dormitory restaurant—can be even cheaper outside) with 100 grams of that lovely, chewy, dark brown buckwheat noodle, pickled radish, cucumber, chili sauce, half a boiled egg and a few slices of meat, I’m most happy to have it almost every day. It’s that or onban (온반), a dish consisting of white rice soaked in warm chicken broth and often topped with a mung bean pancake. Sometimes I’ll get kimchi fried rice or one of the various meat on rice (덧밥) dishes to vary things up a bit. But there are inevitably times when I can’t beat the hankering for a bit of middle kingdom… [Read More]
Archives for April 2018
Bumping into K-Pop Group Red Velvet in Pyongyang
By Alek Sigley (Tongil Tours founding partner and student at Kim Il Sung University) Last Monday (2nd of April), barely a few days after I had first arrived at Kim Il Sung University, I went with a few of the friends I had made in the dormitory to have dinner and relax at the Koryo Hotel in Central District in downtown Pyongyang. The one Canadian and two Chinese students I met up with that evening were bachelor’s students (in other words they were pursuing four year undergraduate degrees in Korean language at Kim Il Sung University) several years already into their degrees. As a new master’s student I had not yet started class, but they had just begun their first semester of 2018 and felt in the mood to recoup after their first day back at school. Little were we expecting to bear witness to a historic act of cultural… [Read More]
Arrival in Pyongyang
By Alek Sigley (Tongil Tours founding partner and student at Kim Il Sung University) On Saturday the 31 st of March I boarded my train in Dandong, China, bound for Pyongyang and not really knowing what at all to expect. I had just picked up my visa on Thursday from the DPRK Embassy in Beijing, and boarded the “hard sleeper” overnight train from Beijing to Dandong just the very next day. I had arrived in Beijing just as Kim Jong Un had made his surprise “unofficial” visit to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping. With two summits (Kim Jong Un and Mun Jae In and Kim Jong Un and Trump) on the horizon, I found myself at an interesting time to be making a long-term stay in Pyongyang as a student. Meeting the Tongsuksaeng Arriving in Pyongyang late in the afternoon on Saturday, I was met at Pyongyang Station by an employee from the Kim Il Sung University… [Read More]
From Perth to Pyongyang: An Australian Student in North Korea’s Kim Il Sung University – Introduction
By Alek Sigley (Tongil Tours founding partner) Written on the 7th of April, 2018. IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT We will be pausing updates for the usual “North Korea Blog” here for the time being. Instead, we will be posting regular updates for a new blog: “From Perth to Pyongyang” (named so because I’m a proud Perthite!), about my experiences as a student at Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University. That’s right! I am writing this blog live from Pyongyang. I’ve been here for almost a week now, and will be here for two to three years in total, during which I will try to update this blog on a weekly basis. I’m currently going through procedures to officially enter Kim Il Sung University’s graduate school for a master’s degree in modern Korean literature. Hence I’ll be in Pyongyang for two to three years—in other words four to six semesters, depending on how quickly… [Read More]
