It's also kind of mind boggling to contemplate the lives Arirang performers[1]. What must that be like?
I was like "wow that is a big screen although not very bright".
> Each background picture is created by about 40.000 childrens holding tables containing pages with different pictures/colours
[zoom of the "screen" with endless pixels: a color square a little head on top of each - impressionist style] https://imageshack.com/i/exw2BFluj
To save anyone else the hassle, this is where he finally crosses into NK:
https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/tumangan-north...
Hope it is backed up well (guess on the archive sites).
Photos of NK like these are incredibly difficult to come by. What a beautiful country.
Also, I admire his courage. In several photos, military people are staring at him, as they may well be. He was lucky as well. He states he hid the photos in a zip file in his C:\windows folder when leaving the country, having deleted them from his SD Card.
This has been one of my best reads of the month, and I hope that I'll one day get to visit Pyongyang myself, without the US visa waiver issues that come with it.
Proves that good content, not fancy CSS or animations, is still the king.
I miss the days of blogs and forums and authentic content like this.
Today it's all hyperpolished platforms filled with clickbaity influencers. Every step of the way, somebody's trying to extract as much money as they can.
I can't help but think that we in this community played a big part in turning it into what it is now and that thought fills me with regret.
Today, the signals young content creators get is that they can make dumb videos on YouTube or TikTok and get 10M subscribers and ad revenue, or set up a geeky blog that will get 100 views a month. But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.
Given the intentionally addictive algorithms and psychological manipulation used by the big tech companies, I think at least some of the blame can be placed on them.
What is the strangest thing you've seen at the airport?
By Aurelio Germes: The strangest thing I've seen was to find nobody not even police or security at the airport, so I took a plane and left the country without anyone noticing it. It was at the international airport in Malabo, island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea.
It happened that I had missed my flight from Malabo to Madrid departing on Sunday and I didn't want to wait a whole week for the next weekly flight, so I decided to call a pilot in Cameroon and charter his plane to come and pick me up in Malabo and take me to the Douala airport in Cameroon where I could more easily catch a plane to Paris. We arranged date and hour of his arrival to Malabo.
On the date agreed I went to the international airport only to find out that it was closed since that day no flights, neither international nor domestic, were scheduled. There was nobody there not even a guard or a clerk, but it was already too late to cancel the trip. The only way out was to jump the wall surrounding the airport and wait on the runway until an aircraft arrived, and that's what I did.
I didn't have to wait long. A small plane with a French pilot arrived and soon we were ready to fly to Douala with me in the copilot seat. We could not take off in our first attempt since a door of the aircraft opened unexpectedly when we were about to take off, but we succeeded in our second attempt.
Due to lack of security, nobody noticed that a plane had arrived at the international airport and left with a passenger.
This is probably the wildest story. A couple drove across the Democratic Republic of Congo from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa on their own.
https://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hubb/ride-tales/democratic...
it's just surrounded by a newer, often uglier (but not always) internet that's more commercialized and gamified. That's just how large human social and economic systems develop over time. The old is if anything given even more potential eyeballs, tools and space in which to continue being appreciated, while the new, among all its defects, also comes with its own opportunities.
It's a bit self-absorbed to think that something that provides a livelihood and means of communication and community to billions of people should disappear because it overshadows a few interesting old things that a smaller number of people enjoy.
And my main complaint is exactly that view of the internet as "providing a livelihood", or in other words, just being another venue of capitalist value extraction.
It stopped being a medium of genuine exchange of ideas and started being yet another money making scheme. What made it special in the early days was precisely the non-commercial nature.
How do we put it back in the spotlight, or at least make it accessible again?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11139896 (155 points | Feb 2016 | 30 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2155794 (124 points | Jan 2011 | 19 comments)
Photos of both places please
UPD: the Eurasia 2005 posts have images from imageshack _us_, all are unavailable.
Maybe someday tourists will be able to stand on it like the 4 Corners in the US. Well I guess technically it's in the river. But they could rig something up.
There were cameras but that's it.
There's not some magical thing when you look across the border and "feel the oppression", in some of the border towns on the Chinese side there were ads for tours where you could go to NK and do some shopping for cigarettes or something. I do not believe I would be able to sign up for those though.
I was just visiting but it's how I imagine some parts of the US/Mexico border are like? It's not like that area of China is super vibrant either, pretty industrial.
I have the impression that when Russia gets involved border stuff gets messy, if all those videos of people driving across Georgia and the like are to be believed.
This video was released a few days ago by a popular American YouTuber, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPmtJSERzys
The start of our trip with the North Korean train (still inside Russia):
http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/irkutsk-skovoro...
Approaching the border between Russia and North Korea (the last kilometers inside Russia):
http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/khabarovsk-khas...
Inside North Korea:
http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/tumangan-north-...
The author wonders aloud several times about the contents of the huge piles of passenger boxes constantly blocking the train corridors. Most coming from russia I'd love to peek in !
Fascinating that they really had the freedom to go about in the middle of nowhere once they reached the 1st station in NK from a seldomly-used point of entry. Bold move!
When I first had the idea there was still a gap in the way in Southeast Asia, but it looks like it may have been closed now: https://www.seat61.com/map-of-train-routes-in-southeast-asia...
Unfortunately you may have to wait some time, at the moment the journey is not be completable because the Paris-Moscow express service (and indeed all train service between Russia and Western Europe) is suspended due to sanctions against Russia.
It is quite obvious that happy citizens walking back and forth on PjongJang streets are part of massive Potemkin Village playact.
Also I like this blogging style. Most others want to insert their fat face and stupid comments into every frame.
If anyone is interested in a beautiful rail adventure with much, much less risk, I highly recommend the round trip <Western Europe> -> Zagreb -> Belgrade -> Bar -> Kotor -> Dubrovnik -> Split -> Zagreb -> <Western Europe>. This makes for a really nice 4 week trip. (The Bar -> Split leg is done via bus.)
When we started this trip in early summer 2015, we expected it to be a nice and relaxed adventure - and it would've been, the landscape simply was beautiful! But then the refugee crisis happened. We saw trains in Belgrade and Zagreb that were so full that people were basically glued flat to the windows, we walked through the enormous refugee camp in Bristol Park near the old main station in Belgrade, we had to fight for tickets while train employees were simply ignoring us because they thought we were refugees trying to sneak into the train, and we had basically all ours trains cancelled on our way back. We got out of Croatia with one of the last busses before Slovenia closed the border for several days and embarked on a very strange 16 hour bus journey from Zagreb to Munich which included being held for hours at the Slovenian border station, and being inspected by German border police in full gear and with MP5s. I remember a female passenger had some problems with her passport, and she was taken away at the Austrian / Slovenian border and we continued without her.
Have a inner seat in a travel bus? Expect a machine gun waving in front of your face.
As children when there wasn't any Schengen and there was actual border control there was WAY less military presence. We could just drive to Germany with our bikes without anyone stopping us.
I know I can just drive a hour more to drive around it where there is no active control but police cars hidden in bushes in the whole German area.
I am not used to stuff like this, for me it's a creepy experience every time.
Edit:// just remembered they recently started to do the same on the Swiss border around Basel. Whatever Germans think that's not normal within shengen. I usually don't see anyone at all on french or Italian borders, especially not young army forces with machines guns
Have seen French border police (sometimes) at the German-French border down here near Freiburg but not the German police.
But yes, German police was present in Basel some weeks ago when I crossed there. Although they had two cars they controlled and let everyone else pass in the long line that had formed, no matter the car plates.
So not sure if there's really that much to it.
I just want to say, take your time on this journey. This region you describe have joys in all the nooks and crannies!
Memories of a place such as Ljubljana in the sunshine, it felt like what it must be as a figure on a cake .. the food and wine of Hungarian villages, outrageous parties in Belgrade, and the Adriatic, if anyone wants to go for a swim, it is all proper lush.
Summer, though, folks. In Winter, it can be a bit of a drag.
- the good old “through coach” („Kurswagen“) which existed until 2013 from pretty much any train station to any train station, for example there used to be one going directly Basel-Moscow - Europe without wars and polarization, easy travel, trust - Optimism about the future, being bright-eyed and enjoying travel - The very form of the blog - Life before smartphonization
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