North Korea—saw it from the DMZ. Saw the world’s largest or second largest flag billowing in the distance, the Potemkin village, as well as an underground tunnel leading into darkness. Our guide made the same annoying joke fifty times: “please don’t defect!” People have to be paid to live on the farms on the South Korean side because it’s so dangerous there, so they are also pretty much Potemkin villages. The “residents” only hang around for a few months out of the year. I was there in the winter, when it was extremely windy and cold. My impression was of a pretty bleak place. The mountains seemed to have all their trees cut down. But South Korea in the winter is also remarkably bleak. Factories, apartments, highways, smog. Having an American soldier show us the world’s most dangerous golf course should have been radicalizing but wasn’t.
Laos—spent a week or two there on two different occasions about ten years ago. My impression was that the country was much poorer than Thailand and that the people made almost no effort to ingratiate themselves with me, whereas Thailand probably has the friendliest people I have ever encountered (aside from some Kurds I met on the Turkish side of Kurdistan). I was a lib at the time but when I saw all the red flags everywhere I was just like, huh, cool. I only remember seeing them at the border with Thailand, and they were small, however. A lot of construction was going on in the new capital, Vientiane, whereas the old colonial capital, Luang Prabang, was in the middle of the jungle on the Mekong River and had a lot of charm. Fellow tourists told me that Chinese companies were cutting down all the trees. If only they were AMERICAN companies! I got into a crazy weird fight at a travel agency in Luang Prabang. It was the only time I’ve ever found myself in a shouting match with a total stranger. But things worked out in the end.
China—only been to the airports. They’re extremely large, new, and efficient and put American airports to shame. I don’t know if this is the policy now, but if you have to transfer, there comes a point where you can just walk out of the airport and hang out in China, even if you don’t have a visa. While I was moving from one terminal to the other I just found myself in front of the doors leading out to the taxis and I was like, whoa. A lib colleague teaches English in China now and told me that life went back to normal there months ago and that the people worship the government like robots. I wonder why!
Kerala—haven’t been, but feel like I want to live there. Ditto with Cuba and Vietnam. I was briefly in the Republic of Georgia as well as Cambodia, but both are obviously no longer leftist (or leftist-seeming in Cambodia’s case) states. It seemed like every other person was missing at least one limb in Cambodia and there were a lot of young kids there. Tbilisi had a cool subway system and some nice architecture but overall seemed pretty dead but I was there for barely more than one day.