Conditions Worsen in Pyongyang
[Update: The Daily NK also has an interesting new Pyongyang photo gallery from a Russian visitor with a real talent for furtive photography. I’m not sure how new this is; some of the pics look vaguely familiar.]
The Emerald City, where only the privileged live and where food has always been relatively plentiful, is losing is hue:
“Nowadays, it is even hard for people in Pyongyang to live. Although rations are given, it is not enough to live on.
Lee informed “Compared to the country, rules and regulations are even stricter in Pyongyang to the point all men must go to work. Alternatively, the majority of housewives utilize the markets and trains to travel to the rural districts selling goods.
“Even the people in Pyongyang must engage in trade, otherwise they have nothing to eat but rice porridge. While the elite are living lives more privileged than the times of the “˜march of suffering,’ the common worker in Pyongyang is indifferent to the citizens in the country” he said. [Daily NK]
Elsewhere, the article notes that families are cooking and heating their homes, including apartments, by burning coal in them, which strikes me as a very dangerous thing to do.
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Heating your house with coal is probably backward but not dangerous unless you re starting a fireplave in the middle of your living room
If your house does not have a coal furnace, it sounds like a great way to get carbon monoxide poisoning.
Heating with coal or charcoal actually has a long history in Korea, both North and South. The koreans call it ondol and it’s kind of similar to roman hypocaust heating. Ondol comes in a large round brick that is burned in a furnace that circulates heat through ducts in the floor. The warm floors are fantastic during the cold korean winters but ondol heating can be very dangerous if the underfloor ducts aren’t well maintained. I don’t know how common ondol heating (by which I mean with burning coal or charcoal vs. a floor heated with resistive current or hydronic loop) is in the south nowadays, but when I was there it was not uncommon to find in older neighborhoods.
Yes. Although the translation is less than perfect, I think the article was trying to say that this was “improvised” ondol. And even under normal circumstances, ondol can be a death trap if you have a cracked floor.