Pre-Tour Meeting

yeah right...

My friend Justin and I set off from our hotel to go for our pre-flight meeting for the DPRK. The meeting room was located a short distance from Beijing station, of course this being Beijing, the distance is always greater, no matter how small it looks on the map. We had some trouble finding the meeting room, but we saw two other young male westerners outside looking confused like ourselves. I asked them straight away if they were part of our tour group and of course, they were. We then proceeded to find the meeting room and were warmly greeted by our tour guides and met the rest of our group.

The meeting was a very relaxed and friendly environment, the people we met were all very nice and friendly and you could tell there was an excitement in the air at going to the DPRK for the first time. The meeting covered the main topics needed for the DPRK and covered the rules and regulations, most importantly don’t under any circumstances criticize the regime, show respect to the leaders by bowing when asked and also don't point, use your full hand open to point. If the guides tell you not to take a picture then don't, if your guides tell you not to go somewhere then don't go there. There were many jokes in the meeting and the tour guides made you feel relaxed and added the boost of excitement about visiting the DPRK. We were told to refer to North Korea as the DPRK or Korea (as they still think of North as South as one country regardless of the ongoing war). We were told that there rules and there is law, if you break a rule once in a while you will just be told about it and try not to repeat it and you will stay out of trouble, however if you break a law, your screwed basically and the tour company can do literally nothing to help you.

One thing that was mentioned in the meeting was the that in the several years of our tour companies existence, they had thousands of people visit the DPRK and only one of them had serious issues, he is still in the DPRK as of writing this, now 15 months, for stealing a sign from a restricted area of the hotel that encouraged the people of the DPRK to respect their leader.

Some of the group were travelling together 2 hours later by train which would take them 24h to reach Pyongyang, the rest of us were travelling the next day at lunchtime by flight. We opted to fly in and take the train out, however stopping at several paces in China on the way home to break the journey, it would have been much better to take the train in and fly out but this did not fit in well with our holidays and schedules. One guy in the group thought he was going the following day by train, much to his surprise he then had to go back to his hotel by taxi and grab his things and come back for the train, but he made it!