I find it really hard to watch travel shows knowing that the soonest I’ll be able to travel north of the Pacific will be in, like, 2025. It’s just too painful to think about the summer I could have had, spilling Aperol spritzes on my spaghetti-themed Hawaiian shirt, if it weren’t for the fact that we have an administration who doesn’t believe in science. My solution? Turn my traveling eyes somewhere that was already off-limits pre COVID-19.
Inside North Korea takes you on a visual tour of Pyongyang’s pastel-decked gymnasiums, government buildings, and theaters to show the “socialist fairyland” of Kim Jong-Un’s dreams. Erased by bombing during the Korean War, the capiral city was rebuilt from scratch from 1953, in line with the vision of the nation’s founder, Kim Il Sung. At once brilliant and unsettling, the whole thing feels sort of like what would happen if Wes Anderson designed a gulag.