Yes yes yes, I couldn’t get enough of the dynamic and metropolitan North East of China. As you and I and everyone really know, I’m a bloody communist. There are only two real communist countries left on the entire planet. Cuba and North Korea. Well, I’m nowhere near fucking Cuba, so North Korea it was!

Honestly what person worth their marbles would bother visiting a tropical island untouched by the ravages of materialism when they could brush up against a Stalinist Stronghold where the citizens feast on bark and make praise to a dead president?

Well before I could brush buttcheeks with the Kim Jong Un-reasonable’s silly little paradise, I had to land in North North Korea. The Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture.

Well it just so happens China has it’s own little piece of Korea. Or it used to. While the area North of North Korea was at one point in time home to a large number of ethnically Korean people, most of them who had the fortune of being brought up in the post Mao-era learned to speak fluent Mandarin. Of course they also speak perfect Korean. This makes them indispensable to the many South Korean conglomerates conglomerating in the many areas of China that are not Yanbian. There’s almost no ethnic Koreans left in Yanbian with the exception of retirees, and possibly some refugees from the South (which is actually the North, but you get what I mean).

Most of the people living here are Han, serving the lame Han tourists and even lamer western tourists coming to see all the Korean restaurants, that are run by Han people. This shouldn’t be surprising. If you could speak both Chinese and Korean, and had the opportunity to make triple or quadruple what the average salary was, in a place where the average winter temperature wasn’t 20 degrees below freezing, why wouldn’t you seize it?

Filed under: tourist shit