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Pyongyang Chapter 2 Summary

How It All Goes Down

  • Guy and Sandrine eat out at a few of the restaurants at the hotel. There’s Restaurant No. 1, Restaurant No. 2., and the creatively named Restaurant No. 3 (under renovation).
  • The restaurants are practically devoid of people, but the tablecloths are covered in gross stains.
  • The next day, Guy walks around, observes North Korea—”Very clean. Too clean, in fact” (2.43), he says—and gets a Korean history lesson every now and then.
  • Guy also gets stuck with a production assistant who sings Korean propaganda songs over and over again.
  • Later, Guy gets to visit the opulent Pyongyang Subway, which doubles as a fallout shelter. He describes it as “a subterranean palace” (2.83) that is “lit up like Las Vegas” (2.85). We’re not sure about you, but we could go for a fallout shelter lit up like Vegas. Er, wait. Fallout shelter?