I signed up for the Pyongyang International Marathon to be part of the first group of "athletes" allowed into North Korea after the borders slammed shut five years ago.
For the past six years, Iโve dedicated myself to learning Koreaโs historyโboth North and Southโwhich has earned me several awards and the title of Honorary Citizen of Seoul. But my curiosity doesnโt stop at the DMZ. I wanted to go beyond the border, to meet North Koreans face-to-face, speak with them in Korean (as best I could), and see the people behind the regime.
This was actually my second visit to North Koreaโmy last trip was in December 2018, just months before the borders closed. But this time, it felt different. With my backgroundโliving in South Korea, married to a South Korean, and having made videos with North Korean defectorsโI honestly wasnโt sure if they'd even let me in. And if they did, how would they react to me?
On our last day in Pyongyang, North Korea, the weirdest things happenedโnot just at the Grand Peopleโs Study House, but also at the department store, the metro, and nearly every other place we visited.
Enjoy the adventure.
์ ๊ฐ ํ์๊ตญ์ ๋ง๋ผํค์ ์ ์ฒญํ ์ด์ ๋, ๊ตญ๊ฒฝ์ด ๋ซํ ์ง 5๋
๋ง์ ์ฒ์์ผ๋ก ๋ถํ ์
๊ตญ์ด ํ์ฉ๋ โ์ ์โ ๊ทธ๋ฃน์ ํฌํจ๋๊ธฐ ์ํด์์์ต๋๋ค.
๋จ๊ณผ ๋ถ, ํ๋ฐ๋์ ์ญ์ฌ๋ฅผ ์ง๋ 6๋
๊ฐ ๊พธ์คํ ๊ณต๋ถํด ์๊ณ , ๊ทธ ๋
ธ๋ ฅ ๋๋ถ์ ๋ช๋ช ์์ ์์ํ๊ณ ์์ธ์ ๋ช
์์๋ฏผ์ด๋ผ๋ ์นญํธ๋ ๋ฐ๊ฒ ๋์์ต๋๋ค. ํ์ง๋ง ์ ์ ํธ๊ธฐ์ฌ์ DMZ์์ ๋ฉ์ถ์ง ์์์ต๋๋ค. ๊ตญ๊ฒฝ ๋๋จธ ๋ถํ ์ฌ๋๋ค์ ์ง์ ๋ง๋๊ณ , ํ๊ตญ์ด๋ก ์ด์ผ๊ธฐ ๋๋๋ฉฐ, ์ฒด์ ๋ค์ ์๋ โ์ฌ๋๋คโ์ ์ง์ ๋ณด๊ณ ์ถ์์ต๋๋ค.
์ด๋ฒ์ด ๋ถํ ๋ฐฉ๋ฌธ์ ๋ ๋ฒ์งธ์์ต๋๋ค. ์ฒ์ ๋ฐฉ๋ฌธ์ 2018๋
12์, ๊ตญ๊ฒฝ์ด ๋ซํ๊ธฐ ์ง์ ์ด์์ฃ . ํ์ง๋ง ์ด๋ฒ์๋ ๋ชจ๋ ๊ฒ์ด ๋ฌ๋์ต๋๋ค. ํ๊ตญ์ ๊ฑฐ์ฃผํ๊ณ ์๊ณ , ํ๊ตญ์ธ ๋ฐฐ์ฐ์๊ฐ ์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ํ๋ถ๋ฏผ๋ค๊ณผ๋ ์ฝํ
์ธ ๋ฅผ ๋ง๋ค์ด์จ ์ ์ ๋ฐฐ๊ฒฝ ๋๋ฌธ์ ์
๊ตญ ์์ฒด๊ฐ ๋ถ๊ฐ๋ฅํ ์๋ ์๊ฒ ๋ค๋ ์๊ฐ์ด ๋ค์์ต๋๋ค. ๋ง์ฝ ๋ค์ด๊ฐ๋ค ํด๋, ๋ถํ ์ธก์ด ์ ๋ฅผ ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ๋ฐ์๋ค์ผ์ง ์ ์ ์์์ฃ .
๋ถํ ํ์์์์ ๋ง์ง๋ง ๋ , ์ธ๋ฏผ๋ํ์ต๋น๋ฟ๋ง ์๋๋ผ ๋ฐฑํ์ , ์งํ์ฒ , ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ๋ฐฉ๋ฌธํ ๊ฑฐ์ ๋ชจ๋ ์ฅ์์์ ์ด์ํ ์ผ๋ค์ด ๋ฒ์ด์ก์ต๋๋ค.
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