Statues, Universities and Food Poisoning!

The following day we were up early again to visit the square where the two giant statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il stand. We had to pay our respects to the two leaders and bow at their statues,  this is a must on any DPRK trip, if you dont want to bow, I believe you have to stay in the coach, but this is considered very rude in the DPRK. The statues were very impressive and grand in size.

On the afternoon we visited a university in Pyongyang where we could interact with the students and see their classes in action, however this felt a little uneasy as they were to learn and we could just go in and take pictures and film anything we wanted. However the experience was still great. There were various rooms in this university such as classrooms, video and TV rooms using old VHS, and a music appreciation room. At the end of the visit we got to interact with an English speaking class, two of the guys on our tour were speaking to them and one even asked the group if they had ever been to Dublin!!!












Later that afternoon we got to ride on the Pyongyang underground which uses the old Berlin trains and its also the deepest underground in the world! Its also used for shelter should an attack occur. We got to ride twice on the metro and this was a great experience, each carriage had pictures of the leaders on them. The last stop took us to the Arc of Triumph which is a replica of the one in Paris and they even make a point of saying its bigger! The view form the top was very nice and we saw a lot of the city, although this day there was a light mist.


By the evening we were supposed to do a pub crawl in Pyongyang however due to food poisoning there were quite a few from our group not feeling well so we halved the bars we were going to see and rested beforehand. We played some bowling in a massive bowling alley and then went onto some more bars, we did not have a big night out though in the end. One of the guys on our group was really rude to the guides and said that its St Patrick's day in Ireland that the pub we were in was crap and it wasn't like St Patrick's day at all!! our guide could not have been any better, she was very organised and helpful and always tried to accommodate whatever she could.









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