The Ryugyong Hotel with its 3,000 rooms and seven revolving restaurants should be the largest hotel and one of the tallest building in the world. It has, however, been left uncompleted for more than fifteen years, due to lack of good quality concrete coupled with financial problems. With the hotel standing 330 m tall, Pyongyang‘s skyline is marked forever by this rough concrete construction, the first structure over 100 floors built outside the United States. Photo by: wordthecat

What has become a ghost tower was intended as a showpiece to demonstrate North Korea‘s power and grandeur to the world. Composed of three vertical triangular wings, assembled in a ”Y” shape, the construction pierces the landscape like an arrow. Despite its modernity, the hotel’s massive form and eerie ruination makes it look more like an ancient pyramid than a twentieth-century skyscraper. Photo by: Kernbeisser

The style is neither High Tech nor Postmodern. It is somewhere between Brutalism and Constructivism, seen through the lenses of an Orwellian dimensions. It could be viewed  as symbolic of North Korea‘s many thousands of anonymous individuals. Nowadays, Ryugyong Hotel, its surrounding gardens and facilities, and the $750 million it tool to get it to this stage are slowly deteriorating in front of the eyes of Pyongyang’s inhabitants. Photo by: Pricey

Baekdu Mountain is a volcanic mountain on the border between China and North Korea. At 2,744 m, it is the highest mountain on the Korean peninsula. The area is a known habitat for tigers, bears, leopards, wolves, and wild boars. One of the highest crater lakes in the world, Heaven Lake, is at the top of the mountain. It has a circumference of 14 km, with an average depth of 213 m and maximum depth of 384 m. From mid-October to mid-June, the lake is covered with ice.

When in North Korea, foreign visitors will often be asked to pay homage to the Great Leader President Kim Il Sung. This will usually be done at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace.Visiting the Kumsusan Memorial Palace to pay homage to Kim Il Sung is quite an experience. Entry is through a long passageway which has the longest travelator that I have seen in my life. I was advised by my guides that it was installed at the initiative of the Great Leader General Kim Jung Il so that visitors would not get tired when walking to the palace. “The great leader is always thinking of the comfort of his people”, one of my guides said. At the end of the passageway, visitors have to step on a slowly-moving conveyor belt that takes them through an x-ray machine which is like a giant version of the machines that x-ray baggage at airports (heavens know how many millirems of radiation I received) and then through a room where powerful jets of air are directed on your body (maybe that’s to blow off any germs that have been killed by the x-rays). If you are a female visitor, I recommend you do not bother getting your hair done before the visit, because there won’t be anything left of your hairdo when you emerge from the blower room.

This Pyongyang building is not actually a government ministry or a place of terror, but the Yu-kyung hotel. In a strange coincidence, it is the same height as the building in 1984 and contains the same number of rooms. Construction of the building began in 1987 and was abandoned four years later. Some people say that faulty engineering has left it structurally unsound, and visitors are not allowed to approach it up close.