I was intrigued by this book review ...
What to Read - Inside the Hermit Kingdom Salon.comA cross between Shangri-La and Auschwitz, forever mysterious, untouchable, inaccessi...
.... the bizarre spectacle of the vacant Ryugyong Hotel (aka the "Hotel of Doom") towering over Pyongyang...
... If you went out on a moonless night in the years after the nation's electrical grid effectively collapsed, the only way you could tell anyone else was around was by the coal of their cigarette burning in the dark. There's the writing paper sold in state stores, made of corn husks that "would crumble easily if you scratched too hard," so that people wrote on paper scavenged from the margins of newspapers. And then there's Vinalon, "a stiff, shiny synthetic material unique to North Korea," of which the fatherland was ludicrously proud. Vinalon takes dye so poorly that everyone's clothes (which were mostly uniforms to begin with) were limited to drab grays, blues and browns...
...With the factories and electricity shut down, the air over Chungjin is pristine again, and you can see every star in the night sky. Doctors provide herbal remedies, but only because they have nothing else; furthermore, they are required to spend weeks camping out in the mountainous countryside, harvesting wild plants. Some resort to growing their own cotton in order to have bandages. Most North Koreans have never seen a mobile phone and don't know that the Internet exists....
Oh. Wait. What about Google Earth?
Yep, it works. You can visit the construction site of the Hotel of Doom, and tour Pyongyang from the air. You can even see the USS Pueblo, the only American ship in enemy hands:
There are many more Panoramio images than one might expect (blue boxes above), though only in the tourist parts of the city. There are several attractive sites; the infamous hotel is atypically ugly.
There are very few vehicles in the satellite images or the Panoramio pictures. One nearby city seems to have no significant roads and no vehicles in most of the residential areas.
The North Korean images are not very high resolution. There are no economic incentives to image North Korea, so you don't see anything like standard Saint Paul resolution ...
Within a few years though, even the low res treatment will show playground structures and perhaps pedestrians. The flying tours of North Korea will only improve.
We can see much of them, and they cannot see us at all.
It's an eerie sensation.
Which brings me to my first (and, thus far, only) prediction for the next decade.
The North Korean government will collapse.
