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Joined: 24 Jan 2003
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 Posted: Sat Sep 10, 2005 10:02 pm Post subject: North Korean Restaurant in Vladivostok |
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This is quite interesting. A couple of posters have stated that they were palnning to visit Vladivostok. They might want to be on the lookout for the "Pyongyang Restaurant".
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VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (AP) -- There are plenty of noodles and kimchi at the Pyongyang Restaurant -- along with a helping of North Korean propaganda on the side.
It's not quite clear who owns this humble eatery in the Russian Pacific city of Vladivostok, but the staff is all direct from Pyongyang, as is the rhetoric.
"We hate America," proprietor Kim Song Oh said calmly in Russian on learning her customer was American.
"We want the South and North to be together and America shouldn't meddle, it should go."
But the service still comes with a smile, and Kim, who speaks a little English, says politely a couple of times during the conversation: "Nice to meet you."
Nor does she seem all that enamored of her present surroundings, lamenting the problems businesspeople face everywhere in Russia and especially the crime-ridden Far East: too many inspections, too many bribes, too much bureaucracy.
In North Korea, she says, she was a journalist who wrote about flowers cultivated in honor of the communist dictatorship's Kim dynasty -- the Kimjongilia and Kimilsungilia, named after leader Kim Jong Il and his late father and the North's founding ruler, Kim Il Sung.
The restaurant, which opened 18 months ago on the first floor of a hotel, serves all-Korean staples such as bibimbap (rice and meat) and kimchi (pickled vegetables), as well as noodle dishes specific to North Korea.
She also offers a rarity: North Korea's version of soju, the traditional Korean alcoholic drink distilled from corn or rice.
The waitresses wear white with black polka-dotted belts. A video shows dancing women pirouetting in military camouflage. A karaoke machine also beckons.
There's no sign of the Kim personality cult that pervades North Korea, and nothing that would particularly appeal to tourists, although on a recent Tuesday night a group of visiting South Koreans was trying largely in vain to chat up the waitresses.
State-run North Korean restaurants have popped up in a few other countries across Asia whose governments are friendly to Pyongyang, but it's not known whether the Pyongyang Restaurant is one of them, and manager Kim is hesitant to talk about her operation.
Russia shares a 12-mile border with North Korea 75 miles west of Vladivostok, and has warm relations with its neighbor.
President Vladimir Putin's envoy to the Far East, Konstantin Pulikovsky, is a personal associate of Kim Jong Il and visited Pyongyang last month for celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the Korean peninsula's liberation from Japanese rule.
One thing at the Pyongyang Restaurant is definitely not North Korean -- the prices. Dinner for one costs a hefty 480 rubles ($16).
Kim is reluctant to talk about the differences between her impoverished country, where life is a struggle simply to survive, and capitalist, democratic South Korea. Has she seen any TV pictures of the booming South during her time abroad?
"You're asking too many questions," she replies, and disappears to tend to other customers.
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