NORTH KOREA STORIES from the 27yr old who visited every country!

hi I'm Sal Ivalo I've been to every single country in the world and the one that I get asked about the most is North Korea so today I'm gonna talk to you guys a little bit about my trip to North Korea what I think about the place and how you can go yourself North Korea is in the media constantly we hear only negative things about it we hear about the dictatorship we hear about human rights abuses we hear about nuclear war and all of that is true and as a part of the North Korea story but I think there's also so much more about the country to learn about and to know about and so hopefully today I can talk to you about what it's like to be an American tourist in North Korea North Korea is a place that I know a lot about because in university I used as a case study for my degree so I've read essentially every book seen every documentary looked at every report about the place for the past like five or ten years however what we know about North Korea is quite limited and also what we know about North Korea is quite old information comes out so slowly from this country that what we know now is probably more accurate of a truth about North Korea five years ago than it is accurate about a North Korea now and that's a really interesting thing to keep in mind now there has to be a huge disclaimer about visiting North Korea and saying that what you are shown is a very specific aspect of the country with any visit to any country you're only seeing a certain amount and you need to be mindful of that and to realize that your North Korea experience or your French experience isn't an entire experience of that country you're seeing very specific things and so we need to not only think about what we've seen but what we haven't seen and in a place like North Korea what we haven't seen is more important than what we did see I realized how different my preconceived notions about North Korea will be from the reality the second that I landed in North Korea you always have to be with two guides one male and one female guide and even if you're on a private trip or if you're on a group trip you are with these two guides I did two days private and four days in a group I had told them that I love road trips that I wanted to go as far as we could in those two days just to see as much landscape to see as many small cities as was possible so the plan was that we were gonna drive like four hours to this hot springs village up north I think as we were driving we got lost the driver didn't know where we were going there was something like a bridge had fallen and they didn't know the exact route around so we were stopping in along side fields asking farmers hey do you know how to get to this city we were pulling over in small towns asking you know where can we go like how do we get there and so for anybody who thinks that in North Korea you're gonna everyone will know exactly where you are that you're being spied on that you're like GPS track that your route is perfectly planned and that there are actors along the route trying to you know like perform for you that's simply not true tourists are not that important it is important for them to see specific things but I think that we as foreigners like to think that we hold a bigger standing than we really do before I came to North Korea even I someone who's been all over the world who has friends from every country who has such varied experience and understands the diversity of the world and has connected with people from everywhere even I thought that going to North Korea I was going to be seeing aliens essentially I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to connect with them I was nervous that our lived experiences would be so different that we would have no way of becoming friends or connecting at all and that's simply not true I ended up hanging out with the mail guy and staying up with him in the driver until like 3:00 in the morning and we were talking about girls and are making our fathers proud and being successful in our careers and our childhoods and all of the things that are just normal human experiences that any young guy has in common and I think that was of all my travels that was one of the most important lessons was to see that somebody who is completely on a different part of the world and a completely different lived reality we still share so much simply through our humanity and that will always like stay with me as my biggest lesson from North Korea beer festival and it was the only time where we were told to go in and see we'll see the guides in three hours so I think they were at the entrance so we couldn't leave but for three hours we had full full free rein to just go in the big festival wherever we wanted to go and a lot of the tourists that I were what they were really excited to trial a North Korean beer and get drunk on North Korean beer I'm not drinking and so I wasn't super fascinated by that what I did was I was like let's meet North Koreans so I went and I there was a table of maybe like six chairs and there was five people sitting down and I stood really awkwardly next to the sixth one and they were like looking off of me and finally they said do you like want to sit down I was like oh yeah sure like you know never thought that us and these five guys and I think there's four guys in one woman they ended up being the the chemists for the beer company and so they were telling me all about the local beer when I said I was from America their Co Budweiser is your beer and my auntie was there and she's from Australia and there I go Foster's is your beer and they knew a lot about international beer and like how to make it in one man they called him the grandfather of North Korean beer I guess he's the head chemist and he had created a lot of them he he was so nice he didn't speak any English at all I didn't write anything they were translating a little bit for him but he was just so excited to be talking to an American and like he like wanted to take like a lot of photos with me and they were interested by the camera and like to ask me questions and I met there like a little baby son and it was just a really nice like hour of hanging out they they brought they bought me a lot of food and we were just sitting and kind of hanging out and that was a really beautiful experience again because just a simple connection even though there was a language barrier we were able to get to know each other in a small way a disclaimer about anybody that you interact with as a foreigner while we are in North Korea is super elite so to be in any situation where you're around a foreigner as a North Korean would mean that you're the elite of the elite in this stuff interesting North Korea is fascinating Pyongyang is the elite city of North Korea it is actually required to have kind of like a license to live there live in Pyongyang is a privilege only about a little over three million people live in Pyongyang of the 25 million North Koreans so imagine like the top 10% of any country of being in one city and a huge amount of the GDP of North Korea goes into Pyongyang itself so there are big skyscrapers they have more electricity than anywhere else they have a ballet a beautiful library a circus they have like three amusement parks and if you see a lot of this you might think okay North Korea is much more developed than anybody thinks about but you need to realize it's very much in the context of Pyongyang that the experience of those three million citizens in Pyongyang is nothing connected to the other 22 million citizens in other parts of the country sometimes it's frustrating when people will see only Pyongyang and think that that is the experience of multiple North Korea North Koreans or the majority and it's not I mean the I was lucky enough to go to a couple other cities and small towns and nobody's actually trying to hide that North Korea is a lower-income country developing they you know would show us you know they would drive us through farmland and you would see peasants and you would see them on their bicycles and there'd be very skinny we went to the DMZ to the demilitarized zone the border between North and South Korea it's considered the most heavily weaponized place in the world for me it was like kind of a like you don't feel the weight of that when you're there I don't think that um like war would suddenly happen I think you know it would be a buildup so I wasn't afraid at all to be there it was very heavily like made into a tourist situation you know we were brought in to gift shops and told very specific histories that were you know obviously from a North Korean perspective I was asking questions more to see what their answer is rather than to think that it is the answer if that makes sense so you know I would ask a question about you know for exact why did the the Korean War start just to see the way that they would respond to me rather than thinking that what they were saying was factual there's a lot of stuff that is promoted within North Korea as propaganda both internally to the citizens but externally to foreigners that we simply know not to be true but some of it also I think North Korea gets this exceedingly negative like reputation as a propaganda machine but sometimes it is just misunderstanding one funny thing that I hate to do ever when I travel on that they did in North Korea as they brought us to like a traditional home I only like to go into homes of people that I know or I'm friends with I don't like to go into strangers home just to see what at home looks like also it what I knew it's not going to be the traditional North Korean home but I thought maybe they would try and show us as like a fancy woman pretend that that's how all North Koreans live but that's simply like isn't what they did it was I'm sure nicer than the average North Korean home but it surprised me that my expectations of what they would pretend was here what they actually showed was here the reality is probably down there but again that just like shows that there it's not trying to promote like we are the like best most developed people think that there's all this propaganda and all these posters that are saying like down with America and what I found is that is mostly something given to the tourists so you would see a lot of propaganda posters everywhere as you are driving on the streets within down North Korea and Pyongyang in other cities but it would mostly be just North Korean soldiers or you know like a North Korean military tank however when you would go into the tourist souvenir shops then you would see postcards of like a North Korean soldier like stepping on an American helmet or like the white house with a bomb over it you know like scary stuff that was really the only I ever saw it in the tourist souvenir shop which is fascinating there you're getting because I think they know that's what people want and what they want to buy and so people will bring that home vehic look what they do in North Korea but really it's I didn't see that anywhere other than in the shop for the tour so that's the interesting thing about how do you go to North Korea can you go to North Korea I went in August 2016 then Americans were allowed to go since then with the new activity happening Americans have been forbidden to go it's been said that your passport will be invalidated if you go but when I went it was allowed everybody else is still able to go through group tours you will always have guides you will be shown only what they want to show you you will be told only what they want to tell you you won't see the truth in the way that you will want to but you are seeing a truth you are seeing a reality you just have to be very aware that it's not the reality that you're gonna see much much nicer than what is actually exist so in North Korea the tourists are only allowed to use either US Dollars euro or Chinese currency you're not technically allowed to have the North Korean currency and that's for a lot of different reasons mostly of which they want foreign currency tourism is a way for them to get access to foreign currency but they also don't want you to know of actual prices of things so you're only allowed to eat in tourist restaurants stay in tourist hotels that will accept this currency I was there in the summer and it was really really hot and I kept seeing as we were driving around in Pyongyang but everywhere people selling popsicles and people selling ice cream and I wanted a popsicle and I wanted ice cream because it was so hot and I saw these like kids walking around with these like frozen treats and I was jealous and so I the first day I asked the guard can I get a popsicle but I don't have the currency right so I can't and I'm not allowed to walk up to a random place the guides wouldn't like allow that necessarily and and I had been sick like earlier in the day and so the guide just said oh you're sick and now you want ice cream and so he didn't really give me an answer but definitely wasn't it yes so the next day I asked again I saw like popsicles on the Strand said hey can I get a popsicle and they said no okay and it became my mission in my week in North Korea to get ice cream because I thought it was so strange they wouldn't just let me have the popsicle or half of the ice cream so every day I would joke with the guards and it became kind of our thing like that Sal would come up and say like can I have ice cream and I would be told no or they would say oh maybe tomorrow or like next time or oh we don't have enough time to there so you know always an excuse but never a good reason why and the last day we when I was on the group tour we were in some souvenir shop I don't really buy souvenirs when I travel and I wasn't interested too much I was standing outside and they let me do that like stand on the street and just see a lot of people walking by kids going home from school with their parents and and I saw a woman selling ice cream across the street so I went back into the shop and I went up to the guide and I said guess what they're selling outside and he said what and I was bombed ice cream and he didn't say anything he just like walked out and I like followed him and when we got to like we were on the street but where I wasn't allowed to go any further he said oh no you stay here I'll go get you the ice cream and I was shocked I was finally getting my ice cream and yeah then he bought me two cones of ice cream and I just felt like okay now my North Korea experience is complete I finally got this elusive ice cream and it was pretty good I Rita tasted the success tasted better than the ice cream but I still don't understand like well I couldn't just get it off school every day when it was so hot so I think it's really important I don't want anybody to think that I'm promoting North Korea as a government I'm also not trying to say that everything that we know about North Korea is false what I'm saying is that we don't know everything about North Korea and that what we've been told is a very particular message and there is another reality that exists in addition to the reality that we're aware of going there as a tourist brings about a little bit ethical questions of if you're giving money to a regime that is committing human rights atrocities my perspective is that by going and learning and being able to share that with you guys that outweighs the like $1,200 or whatever it was that I spent together North Korea now how do you go to North Korea you get a visa essentially on arrival it's not even putting put into your passport you send in a copy of your passport or like a week before they send your visa to Beijing it's pretty easy it's pretty straightforward I've never heard of anybody being like rejected to go maybe if you're a journalist but honestly it's quite straight for its not hard to go it wasn't at all one of my hardest countries to get to I hope that you liked my stories from North Korea I hope that you learned something new I hope that it makes you see North Korea in a new way but also makes you think about every other country what you don't even know you don't know if you have any comments or any questions comment down below subscribe I've posted a lot of photos from North Korea on Instagram go follow me there and you know let's have a conversation about it and learn more from one another

Channel: Sal Lavallo

Views: 51,977

Rating: 4.9064617 out of 5

Keywords: north korea, pyongyang, kim jong un, korea, dprk, travel to north korea, north korea tourism, videos of north korea, photos of north korea, north korea videos, north korea photos, travel to every country, visit every country, sal lavallo, north korea travel, north korea truth, air koryo, travel, traveler, around the world, least visited countries

Id: Tj3b06RcD1I

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 31 2018