I stayed at a North Korean summer camp. We polished statues and played a game where we destroyed the White House.

TheGoonch@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 210 points –
I stayed at a North Korean summer camp. We polished statues and played a game where we destroyed the White House.
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Despite the boring, miserable and overly controlled experience, I returned the next year. I don't like confrontation, and the Communist Party officials had already signed me up, so I went again.

Could have just... not paid the $300 a second time. Also this dude looks like the 3rd Sprouse brother.

If you willingly pay to go to North Korea you're funding a dictatorship. You're an asshole and if you end up in jail there you should be on your own

A large portion of tourism income, including airfare, goes directly to the government, and North Korea can buy old nuclear warheads for several hundred thousand dollars, which adds up pretty quick with a few hundred tourists.

Bear that in mind if you're thinking of visiting.

But was it worse than Vacation Bible School?

Jesus Christ i hated Vacation Bible School. I know it was just to get us little shits out of the house for five minutes but for fuck sake anything else would've been better

After what happened to Otto Warmbier…. someone would choose to go there?

It probably helped that he is Russian and not American.

An American in North Korea is just asking to be jailed for dubious reasons.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


I tried to find more information, so I subscribed to a group called "Solidarity with North Korea" on VKontakte — Russia's equivalent to Facebook.

In it, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation offered a chance to go to a North Korean children's summer camp for about $300.

I traveled alone from St. Petersburg, where I grew up, to Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, where I joined a group of other children and some Communist Party officials.

Some kids in our group, as young as 12, bought North Korean rice vodka, brought it back to the camp, and got extremely drunk on the first couple of nights.

We also had to participate in concerts, singing propaganda songs in Korean about North Korea's Supreme Leaders, using lyric sheets translated into Russian.

One kid became so indoctrinated afterward that he joined the Communist Party in Russia and was always posting about North Korea.


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Apparently those Bieber bangs made it all the way to Russia a decade ago.