Pyongyang Travel School introduces a different side of North Korea through 8 week course in Seoul
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2021-01-11 17:07
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The Korean Sharing Movement (KSM) ran a new pilot project the “Pyongyang Travel School” (PTS) in Seoul from October to December last year. Funded by the Seoul Metropolitan Government the project aimed to introduce North Korean culture to the South Korean participants by way of imagining a trip to the North’s capital as a tourist. Experts covered a series of topics on all things Pyongyang. Aimed at people in their twenties and thirties and spread over eight weekly sessions, the Pyongyang Travel School provided a space for South Koreans to have their preconceptions about North Korea challenged and get to know more about the city located less than 200km to the north of Seoul. The project came about in a context where the South Korean government, looking for methods to develop inter-Korean exchange despite the current extensive DPRK international sanctions regime, has suggested that tourism from the South could become one way to improve inter-Korean relations.
Seventy years of division and ideological competition has naturally led to a high degree of polarization on the Korean Peninsula. In South Korea, views about the North are of course varied, and often political. The Pyongyang Travel School wanted to provide a new angle to look at the North, one that would not focus on the usual security or humanitarianism discourses. Leaving ideology at the door, PTS took a detailed look at the food, the architecture, the music and cinema, the festivals and even the date locations that exist in the other capital on the Korean Peninsula. A land area three times the size of Seoul but with a third of the population, divided east and west by the sprawling Daedonggang river, and being home to many historical sites and political and culturally important places, there is no shortage of things to talk about when it comes to Pyongyang. KSM did not just explain the city, but try to add a sense of realism by inviting participants to plan their own bespoke three day tour whilst providing them with little known facts from the course instructors’ own experiences during numerous visits to Pyongyang.
Whilst KSM has led over 600 visits to North Korea, most of these were pre-2010 and they were not trips with tourism as the objective. To help KSM develop the PTS experience, the Koryo Tours travel agency provided their Pyongyang guidebook, complete with fantastic photographs, to be translated and slightly edited for a South Korean audience. This guidebook was distributed to the first batch of PTS students.
One of the course’s first sessions was led by South Korean born travel writer Jay Jeong. With her dual Australian citizenship Jay has been able to visit North Korea as a tourist several times in the last few years and went on to write a book about her experiences. With the north being both so close and yet so far from the south the PTS students were eager to ask a lot of questions about Jay’s time in North Korea, not least about how she was received as a South Korean (albeit she was travelling on her Australian passport). In the session on cuisine the similarities in food culture and the difference in particular dishes were highlighted through a virtual tour of Pyongyang restaurants. Participants could again confront the contradiction of familiarity and the unknown in being Korean but living in a different society than the north. The students also had the opportunity to sample food ordered in from a local North Korean restaurant in Seoul. ‘Architecture as the mirror of a society’ was the tagline for Professor Changmo Ahn’s session comparing Pyongyang and Seoul. Professor Ahn claimed that the reflection of ideology in architecture is nowhere in the world as stark as it is in Pyongyang and Seoul. From the opening of Seoul in 1879, through colonialism, liberation and post-war years the city has evolved over time in reaction to its continued adoption of a capitalist system. Pyongyang contrastingly, starting with a blank canvas as it were after the Korean War, strove to reflect a complete form of socialism in the city’s design and architecture. South and North also competed with differing forms of self-proclaimed “authentically Korean” modernist buildings. Other sessions of the PTS focused on festivals and popular culture, introducing North Korean society in a level of detail which is simply impossible for ordinary people to find elsewhere in South Korea.
This brings us back to the essence of the PTS. KSM created a space here in the South for open discourse about North Korea and what that means for Southerners. KSM wants to keep the issue on the table, put it in people’s mind, and encourage debate despite (or all the more because of) the impasse in the Korea Peninsula peace process. Seventy years of division has normalized the abnormal. Thirty years after the Cold War came to an end it remains illegal for South Koreans to access North Korean media and cultural content and North Korean websites are blocked in the South. Removing the prohibition and taboo about North Korea is an important step in unraveling the protracted conflict on the Korean Peninsula, especially for a young generation with less direct experience of both anti-communism on the one hand but also inter-Korean exchange and reconciliation projects on the other.
Due to COVID-19 social distancing measures introduced in Seoul at the end of November the second half of the course and the graduation ceremony took place online. Participant numbers in the end of course excursion were also restricted. That excursion took in those famous sites in Seoul which somehow or other bear traces of Pyongyang, once again reminding us of the numerous ties all around us that bind south and north together. The course also gained publicity with MBC featuring the Pyongyang Travel School in a ten minute feature on their weekly show ‘Unification Observatory’. The Seoul Metropolitan Government is eager to continue and expand the programme moving forward. Regardless of whether South Korean tourism to North Korea is realized, KSM will continue to organize the PTS and confront head-on our preconceptions about the 'other' on the Korean Peninsula.
