Archives for November 2018

By Alek Sigley, founder of Tongil Tours and postgraduate student at Kim Il Sung University.  Earlier this semester Howard (my South Korean-Canadian friend who studies his undergraduate degree at Kim Il Sung University) and I were excited to discover three locally produced breakfast cereals in the supermarket we frequent near the Foreign Student Dormitory. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first breakfast cereals ever produced in the DPRK. They were cheap and would provide us with a good alternative to the tasteless gruel offered for breakfast in the dormitory. We’ll review each of these and three more in turn. But first a little background. The cereals are made by the Kyŏnghŭng company, which produces a range of snacks including biscuits, chocolates, cakes, instant noodles and crisps, as well as beer. Kyŏnghŭng also runs several snack stalls across the centre of Pyongyang and a carwash near Kwangbok Street…. [Read More]

By Alek Sigley, founder of Tongil Tours and postgraduate student at Kim Il Sung University. On Saturday the 15th of September I got together with some of the Chinese exchange students at Kim Il Sung University to go and try the Corn Specialty Restaurant (강냉이 제품전시장) in East Pyongyang. The result is what will be the corniest of my blog posts yet. Located not far from the diplomatic compound, the restaurant features a shop on the first floor that sells a large variety of corn-based snacks, and a 2nd floor restaurant that specialises in dishes that feature corn as an ingredient. While culturally Koreans prefer rice, the DPRK state has put great effort into promoting corn and potato-based foods, since these grow easier in the North’s cold climate and mountainous terrain. Every district of Pyongyang has its own corn specialty restaurant, but these are generally not open to foreigners. This… [Read More]

By Alek Sigley, founder of Tongil Tours and postgraduate student at Kim Il Sung University. As mentioned previously, Kim Il Sung University is located in a prime location. It, and the Foreign Student Dormitory we live in are on one end of Ryomyong (“dawn”) Street, the DPRK’s most recent large-scale residential construction project. This project renovated the street with a host of new apartments, including the tallest apartment block in the country, the 70 Storey Apartment (70층짜리 아빠트), and space for scores of shops and restaurants. In this post I’m going to introduce some of the more interesting shops and restaurants I discovered during my first semester at Kim Il Sung University (April-July 2018). Most of these are down the other end of the street from the dormitory, by the 70 Storey Apartment. I’ll omit the ones I’ve already talked about, but you can read about them in the separate… [Read More]

By Alek Sigley, founder of Tongil Tours and postgraduate student at Kim Il Sung University. Readers may be surprised to learn that Pyongyang has its own (unofficial) Heineken bar. I was most surprised too, especially given that I discovered it purely by chance. The story goes back to late April. It was the weekend and the weather was beginning to warm and myself and some of the other Kim Il Sung University foreign students wanted to take this opportunity to explore more of downtown Pyongyang. I had asked one of the veteran Chinese students (who had completed her undergraduate and was half way through her master’s– spending over six years in Pyongyang in total) for some restaurant recommendations. I jotted down her list, and on this particular weekend we voted to try out a Chinese-style hotpot restaurant near the Potonggang Ryugyong Shop (which sells a lot of high end imported… [Read More]