So I Can Keep the Masthead for a While, I See

Blackouts frequently interrupted a four-day stay in Pyongyang for South Koreans attending a rare joint seminar between the Cold War rivals, with the North’s showcase city often plunged into pitch darkness by power outages.

‘What is going on here?’ a North Korean border control officer said when computer terminals lost power and the lights went out at the Soviet-era Sunan Airport terminal, which serves Pyongyang, while he was processing the documents of the visiting South Koreans.

One of his colleagues tried in vain to keep the line of visitors moving by checking passports in the faint light from a distant door.

When the sun goes down in Pyongyang, people hurry along unlit sidewalks before they have to grope their way home in near total darkness. [Reuters, via Singapore Straits Times]

Earlier this year, the North Koreans were boasting to visitors about the abundance of electricity — generated with fuel oil extorted out of Chris Hill and Team Bush — asking, “Have you experience blackouts in Pyongyang lately?”

I guess we know the answer to that.

One of the visiting South Koreans was injured during a blackout at the hotel where they were staying, considered one of the country’s finest. He bumped his head when stranded in a lightless corridor, leaving him with a gash on his forehead and in need of medical treatment.

‘It’s all because it is so damned dark in there,’ a fellow visitor said.