North Korea-owned restaurant in Cambodia allows rare South-North interactions
The restaurant, called Pyongyang after the North Korean capital, is part of an ambitious expansion plan that has established outlets in some unlikely places, with branches in Bangladesh, Dubai, Laos and Nepal, according to Bertil Lintner, the author of “Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korea Under the Kim Clan.”
On the frosty Korean Peninsula, relations between North and South are perennially tense. But here amid the balmy breezes of this Cambodian tourist town, Koreans from both sides of the border are enthusiastically fraternizing at the North Korea-owned restaurant as if reunification were just days away.
“Everyone is very excited,” said Jung Myong-ho, a South Korean tour guide watching the show one recent evening. “Back in South Korea, we don’t have any opportunities to meet North Korean people.”
You wouldn’t know North and South Korea were technically still at war by the beaming faces all around, the loud applause for the North Korean performers and the frenzy of picture-taking afterward. Northerners and Southerners pose shoulder to shoulder, a moment of cross-border kinship captured with the latest South Korean gadgetry.
He calls the restaurants, which have opened across Asia over the past decade and accept only United States dollars, a “North Korean capitalist experiment,” where wine goes for $30 a glass and meals can run $100 a person.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/world/asia/north-and-south-koreans-mix-in-cambodia.html?_r=1
I had no idea that the North Korean government had a chain of restaurants in so many countries. I wonder how the North Korean employees in Cambodia feel when they return to North Korea after their 3-year contract.
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