I studied in North Korea for a month. The isolation shocked me the most.
19.08.2024 - 11:40
/ insider.com
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Todor Merdjanov, 33, a Bulgarian university student who spent a month in September 2013 attending Korean language classes at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, North Korea.
Merdjanov currently works as a copywriter for a digital marketing agency and an official translator for the Bulgarian embassy in Seoul, South Korea. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
It's been over a decade since I sat in the water of a Pyongyang public bathhouse, fielding questions from several North Korean university students.
The communal bath house is a place for bonding and chatting with friends. It's a cultural staple in both North and South Korea.
It was also a very strange experience to be paddling naked next to the other students from my dorm at Kim Il Sung University in the capital city of North Korea.
I had been studying at the country's oldest university for several weeks, and with almost no opportunities to contact the outside world, I had come to see these students as my friends.
Life at Kim Il Sung University differed greatly from my time as a 22-year-old student of Korean Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria.
When I accepted the offer by my professors to travel to the mysterious nation — with no safety instruction besides what we had learned about the Koreas in our lectures — I was excited to meet North Koreans firsthand.
A classmate and I arrived in Pyongyang after a short flight from Beijing on a hot September day.
We were shown around our accommodation, which we shared with around 35 North Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Mongolian students.
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We were given the rules for our trip by the housing manager, a North Korean man in his forties employed by the university and who oversaw the residence: We could only travel a short distance from the dormitory alone, always ask permission to go further, and respect the curfew of 9 p.m. for all international students.
All the university students wore a uniform. Men wore a white shirt and a dark red tie; women wore a white shirt and a dark pleated skirt.
Everyone, both within the university and outside, also wore a metal badge with the faces of Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, and Kim Jong Il, the recently deceased leader.
Students had lectures Monday through Saturday, with Sunday as the only rest day.
Students took turns cleaning the hallways and gardens of their university in between classes, a custom in schools across East Asia.
My Bulgarian classmate and I were given our lessons separately from the rest of the North Korean student body that attended the university. We had two seminars per day, one on Korean reading comprehension, another on Korean conversation, and an extra class