PYONGYANG: A Journey in North Korea

This graphic novel is an account of the author, Guy Delisle's two months spent in North Korea, supervising an animation project. It gives a Westerner's perspective on a country devoid of all common sense, the result of totalitarian Communism and too much one-sided propaganda. I actually laughed out loud at one point, when a large group of children were throwing buckets of water on a lawn, watering it...just for "fun". There were "volunteers" sweeping the freeways, cutting the grass with scissors, among other mysterious acts, made to keep citizens out of trouble i suppose. The photograph above is probably the most ridiculous modern structure to my knowledge, the Ryugyong hotel. It was built in Pyongyang to host part of the Olympic trials in 1988 and they stopped working on it in 1989. It is over 1,000 feet tall and has 105 floors, and it is completely empty, just a concrete shell with no windows and there it will stand for who knows how long. Millions of dollars were spent building it while many of the local people were starving. The mysteries of humanity...