Travelling to North Korea is always an amazing experience, but visiting North Korea during one of the numerous national holidays unique to the country tends to be even more of an experience. One of our favourite holidays is National Day, which celebrates the founding of the country. When was North Korea founded? Following the conclusion […]

The Sosan Hotel was first opened in 1989 as part of a major construction project that included Liberation Street, Kwangbok Department Store and the Pyongyang Sports Village which all were used for largest international event Pyongyang has ever held, the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students. The hotel was closed in 2013 to undergo […]

Learning complex sentences We are now nearly two weeks in to our Korean Language Study tour and already we’ve learnt some pretty complex sentence structures, such as “I’m a foreign exchange student studying Korean at Kim Hyong Jik university in Pyongyang,” “Peter’s cell phone is in the bag,” and “Richard and I are reading a […]

As a veteran of travel to North Korea, it is fair to say that I have seen a hell of a lot of changes in the country. OK, so China might be modernizing at breakneck speed and changes in the DPRK might be a little more subtle, but the country has seen a lot of […]

The Changgwangsan Hotel was first opened in 1975 to celebrate the nation’s 30th Anniversary of defeating the Japanese during World War II also known as Liberation Day. The hotel is classed as a budget hotel with a North Korean three-star rating. The hotel is a twin-towered 18 storey building with 420 rooms. It went under […]

After arriving in Pyongyang on Saturday and spending the night in the Changwangsang Hotel, we headed to Kaesong for the usual DMZ visit. Daily life studying Korean in the DPRK Monday was when things got interesting on our first day at Kim Hyong Jik University. Our teacher is lovely with a surprisingly quick pace and […]

While the idea of “North Korea customs” might conjure intimidating imagery of strict, intense checks by stone-faced North Korea soldiers, most visitors to North Korea are struck by the reality that some of the first interactions they have with North Koreans either in Sinuiju coming on the train from Dandong or Pyongyang by flight from […]

Hamhung is the capital of South Hamgyong Province and the second biggest city in the DPRK with a population of approximately 800,000. The city serves as an important industrial center and port on the east coast of the DPRK. Being an 8-hour drive away from Pyongyang, this area of the DPRK is seldom visited by […]

Part of the fun of travel is learning about particular customs and habits of your host country. Being “a good house guest” when traveling can make or break a trip and being culturally aware and sensitive when traveling in new foreign lands is one of the most important factors, in this particular writer’s opinion, of […]

In this series about the procedure to get an Iranian visa for the three unlucky nationalities which cannot get a visa for Iran on arrival, we’ll be looking at how to get an Iranian Visa in the UK and more precisely, how to get a visa for Iran in London. Of the three nationalities that […]