The Wandering Scot

North Korea's Mass Games

August 3, 2011

I attended the Mass Games in Pyongyang. They were a bizarre, wonderful and very intense experience. (More photos here.)

The current version of the games, the “Arirang”, tells the history of North Korea through a giant series of dance and gymnastic sequences. There are reportedly up to 100,000 participants, although only a few hundreds or thousands appear in any one scene. Fifteen thousand children with giant flipcard books provide a continually changing background display. The games take place in a giant custom-built stadium. I had coughed up the 150 Euros (ouch) for a first class seat in the central viewing area.

Birth of Kim Jong Il

The many scenes include the historic birth of Korea; the struggle against the Japanese; a celebration of the birth of Kim Jong Il (yes, really!); the happy prosperity of the nation (!!); a joyful vision of the future reunification of Korea; and a paean to Chinese-Korean friendship.

Prosperity!

The tone is not particularly militaristic. It is often light and in a few places even playful, with friendly pandas doing pratfalls, and comical chickens and pigs dancing to celebrate prosperity. There is no overt hostility to either South Korea or the US. But the background music is stirring, the massed coordination is often daunting, and the general mood is intense and fervent.

Photographs and videos can’t really convey the intensity of seeing the live performance. As soon as you step in, you are swept up in the forceful warm-up music. The staging and presentation are extremely skilful: you initially see a vast wall of banners and then through them advancing what seems like an infinite army of performers. The stadium is too wide to be easily taken in in one glance, I had to keep my eye roving to see the full picture. The scene transitions are often cleverly dramatic: as one scene winds down and the actors start to exit, we are allowed to glimpse a new army of performers massing in the back, then the lights are dimmed, leaving just enough light to see a shadowy horde surging forward onto the arena floor.

The dancing and gymnastics are well choreographed. If they were performed by a few score people, they would be only moderately amusing. But when they are performed on the Mass Games scale they become a very different thing. Some of the scenes are elegant ballet like performances, other are mass marching or banner waving, others are seemingly informal, such as the invasion of the happy farm animals.

Most of the performers are young adults. A couple of scenes involved hordes of 8-10 year olds.

The performances are skilful, but on this scale a few flubs are probably inevitable. I noticed a couple of the younger kids accidentally collide and go sprawling. But part of their training seems to be in quick recovery, and amidst the mass of performers you have to watch carefully to spot glitches and the overall experience continues undisturbed. There was heavy rain in mid-performance. We spectators were safely under cover, but the performers got pretty wet and had to cope with shallow puddles.

I liked the experience enough that I coughed up more Euros the next day for a second look. It was actually better the second time, partly because I had a better sense of what the script was trying to say and partly because I could anticipate the timing and what to watch for. Also, since it was dry, they were able to include the concluding grand firework display this time.

It’s great. Just do it.

Nagorno-Karabakh: Shushi

May 26, 2011

I took a marshrutka out from Stepanakert to the old scenic town of Shushi.

Shushi was on the front-line of the 1990’s Nagorno-Karabakh war and suffered heavy damage. It was an Azerbaijan stronghold, opposing Armenian-held Stepanakert. Over the course of the war most of the population fled, and the town still has many abandoned buildings.

Ghazanchetsots

I started at the Ghazanchetsots Armenian Orthodox cathedral, which is partly restored but mostly new built and looks very spiffy. The interior has some well-executed modern murals in a classic icon style. Then I strolled out to the old city walls. These also appear to have been fairly aggressively restored after the war: most of the stonework looks fairly new.

After some searching, I found my way to the remains of the old mosque. In an elegant theological touch, it’s two minaret towers have the Arabic letters for “Allah” repeated in white-on-red stripes ascending up towards heaven. The mosque interior is gutted and the courtyard is overgrown with weeds.

The center of town contains many decrepit old Soviet-style apartment blocks. But there is also some amount of new construction and renovation going on. Further out there are many derelict and abandoned buildings, some mere shells.


The Old.	The New.	The Abandoned.

Tehran: National Jewels Museum

May 17, 2011

The Peacock Throne

The Tehran National Jewels Museum is truly over-the-top, with a staggering collection of gem encrusted artifacts.

I had missed this when I was in Tehran in 2008, so I made sure to catch it this time.

The collection is in 37 large display cases, full of many lavishly decorated items. There are bright crowns, covered in pearls, a red and green encrusted globe, endless small artifacts covered with small red, green, and white stones.

OK, my first reaction on seeing all of this was to assume it couldn’t all be real. There is just too much stuff. And too many bright colors. It looks like costume jewelry. It can’t possibly all be real. Can it?

Reza Khan Crown

Then I stopped, and thought, and read the guide book. This is the accumulated collection of the Shahs of Persia. For several centuries they were the wealthiest potentates of the region, avidly buying up the best gems for their treasury. And that collection was never broken up. The 19th c. shahs added to it, including many large South African diamonds. The 20th c. Pahlavi shahs added further jewels and the collection survived the 1979 revolution intact. So, yes, the Museum is hosting the centuries old accumulated collection of very wealthy rulers. So, gulp, it is probably mostly real. (Even the best museums have the occasional imposter.)

Some of the more striking pieces include

the Reza Khan crown (with 3380 diamonds and 368 matched pearls)
Jewelled Buckler

the Darya-i-Nur “Sea of Light” 182 carat pink diamond
a large globe with the land marked with rubies and the seas with emeralds
a sword scabard entirely covered in 1869 rose-cut diamonds
a circular shield decorated with giant rubies and emeralds
just outside the vault proper is a display room holding the jewel encrusted Peacock Throne.

Oh my.

Jewelled Globe

Some items do look rather gaudy: I guess when you use large emeralds and rubies, it is hard to look restrained.

The Museum is not sign posted. It is in a bank vault underneath the Melli Bank on Ferdossi Street, but to reach the Museum you need to enter via the the Central Bank building just to the North. They store your bag (and camera), run you through a metal detector and then send you South across a courtyard to the vault.

The Museum hours are 2:00-4:30 pm on Saturday to Tuesday. It is definitely worth trying to visit if you are in Tehran.

Astara Border Crossing Zoo

May 14, 2011

The Caged Queue

The Astara border crossing from Azerbaijan to Iran turned out to be a bit of a zoo.

The border crossing is very slow, and to maintain order the Azeri authorities have created a special queuing area with four distinct queues separated by cage-like walls. Every 30-40 minutes the authorities would open the steel door for one of the queues and let 20-30 people into the main immigration area. Each queue might only move every couple of hours.

Ahh, but the Azeris do not like to queue. Especially not for 4+ hours. So when a door opened some people in adjacent queues would frantically climb up through the roof and try to force their way down into the moving queue. And as the authorities tried to reclose the steel door, people would frantically try to force their way through anyway, sometimes using planks of wood to try to reopen the door!

Queue Jumping

I arrived at 8:15am. There were already several hundred people queued. By 11:45 I was still stuck in line and I climbed up and traversed out for a bathroom break. But of course, at that very moment our steel door opened, my queue started to move, and I had to frantically start climbing back in. Luckily people saw that I was just reclaiming my earlier place and made it easy for me, which was nice of them.

But woops, I was spotted by the authorities. You! I was waved angrily to the head of the line. I don’t speak Azeri, but the gist seemed to be a rather annoyed “You’re a foreigner!” I was ushered through into the immigration area and then ushered to the front of the inner queue. I felt simultaneously guilty for queue jumping and also slightly silly for not having played the “foreign tourist” card earlier.

I was quickly processed through Azeri immigration, with only a short discussion of British football teams. But the Iranian side was more interesting.

I was stamped into Iran fairly quickly. But then after a short pause, I was escorted upstairs to the immigration police headquarters. Where everyone was very nice, but my papers were very carefully checked. The chief himself reviewed all of my many passport stamps, no doubt looking for the dreaded I*****i stamp. He exclaimed in mild amusement when he finally deciphered “Paraguay” and the mood got a little lighter. Eventually he was done, everyone seemed happy, and I was handed off to a soldier with a rifle, apparently to show me out. Ah, but not quite.

The soldier escorted me out of immigration. And then into town. And then towards the local police station. And then into an interview room. Woops. But everyone seemed pretty relaxed and the police merely rechecked my passport and asked the usual “where are you from” kind of questions. And then I was carefully fingerprinted. This was probably the main reason for my visit to the police station: UK immigration fingerprints Iranians, so Iran is determined to return the favour.

After fingerprinting, I was led out to wash my hands and then waved onwards. Amidst the enthusiasm to check my passport and fingerprints, I had somehow bypassed customs, so we were all done. Hurrah!

After all that, I splurged on a taxi to Ardabil, and then took a bus on to Tabriz.

Practicalities: I think my timing (8:15am on a Saturday) was especially bad. I arrived after the locals had already mostly joined the queue, and very few people were joining behind me. By the time I finally got through, there was only a fairly short queue behind me. If I had arrived at (say) 2:00pm I might have had only a fairly short wait. Also, I should probably have played the “foreign tourist” card earlier. There seems to be an area to the left (East) of the caged queue where some officials were housed and maybe I could have talked my way through there.

The Itaipu Dam

March 14, 2011

Itaipu Dam

I caught a local bus out to the visitor center at the giant Itaipu (“it-eye-poo“) dam on the Brazil-Paraguay border. Depending how you measure it, this is either the #1 or #2 hydroelectric plant in the world, with a peak generating capacity of 14 Gigawatts. Yowza!

I signed up for the “Special Circuit” tour, which actually goes inside the dam.

We watched an introductory video, which included lots of eco-friendly chit-chat about how the dam companies are funding various worthy local initiatives. This all seemed fine, but rather distracting small potatoes stuff compared to the great dam itself!

There was tight security on the tour. We weren’t allowed even small bags, and we were each hand scanned before boarding the bus. In theory shorts and exposed toes are forbidden for safety reasons, but our guides tactfully overlooked several short and sandal clad visitors.

Itaipu Spillway

We were lucky, some of the spillways were open. (This only happens around 10% of the time.) There was a pretty serious volume of water going through, and at high speed. Our guide told us that the current flow rate was 7.8 million litres/sec (7,800 m³/sec) . Yikes. The spillways are designed so that at the bottom there is a very hard wall which cause the water to shoot up and away from the end of the spillway, to reduce erosion under the exit. Each of the gates is 20m wide and several were open.

Spillway Closeup

One difficulty in photographing the dam is conveying a sense of scale. It’s all ****ing enormous. The overall dam length is 7km. When we were there, the spillways were firing out several times the average volume of Iguazu Falls.

We drove along the top of the dam and stopped for photos of both the Parana and spillways downstream, and the giant lake Itaipu upstream. I thanked the mighty Rio Parana for graciously sharing his power.

Control Room

Generator Hall

Inside the dam, we had to wear hard hats. We were shown an internal open shaft running all the way down (100m?) to the original river bedrock. Then we were taken to a viewing gallery over the main control room, with its staff of 5 Brazilians, 5 Paraguayans and (on alternating shifts) either a Paraguayan or a Brazilian chief. The international border runs down the middle of the room. Then we were taken to the giant Generator Hall, which we were told is 1 km long. There isn’t much to see there, just giant red covers on the floor over the generators.

For the finale we were taken down to see the rotating vertical shaft of a generator. 700 Megawatts of rotating steel just a few feet away!

Right now over 90% of the energy is going to Brazil. They generate at different frequencies (50 Hz or 60 Hz) for the two countries. Our guide was careful to explain that everything is handled evenly between the counties. However, Brazil seems to have been the main driver in the construction and is the main power consumer. And they built and run the visitor centre too.

This was a really great tour! If you’re visiting Iguazu, don’t overlook this.

Brest Fortress, Belarus

December 26, 2010

The Brest Fortress complex commemorates the heroic defence of the Soviet garrison against the German invasion of June 1941.

I entered the Hero Fortress at its new ceremonial entrance: a giant concrete slab with a Soviet star cut into it. Stirring martial music plays as you enter. The gateway was rather grayer and drabber than I expected, but still very impressive. It looks better seen from inside the fortress than from outside.

I arrived just in time to see a set of local teenagers do a “changing of the guard” ritual at the eternal flame, complete with high-stepping precision marching. In a small concession to the intense cold, they had their ear flaps folded down.

The fortress complex includes various large Soviet-era memorials. There is a fine concrete sculpture “thirst” of a soldier reaching his helmet out to gather water.

The main monuments are a giant obelisk (100 m) in the form of a Soviet bayonet and an enormous concrete head of a scowling Soviet soldier. Unfortunately while the head is large, it is poorly formed and unsympathetic.

I also ambled through the Fortress Museum, which has some displays of the 19th c. fortress, and even a very short display on the 1939 Polish defence, but which is naturally focused on the 1941 defence, with many photos of the defenders.

Commentary: In 1941 the Soviet Union desperately needed some heroic myths, and the “Defence of the Brest Fortress” fit the bill. A small group of heroic defenders, stemming the flow of the German invasion. It’s a good story and I don’t doubt the defenders were truly heroic. However the German advance seems to have been focused on deep penetration and encirclement, which implies bypassing fortresses and fixed defence points and leaving those to be mopped up later by secondary forces. So the leisurely siege is unlikely to have impacted the main invasion.

The following day: At the Brest station, I met three unhappy travelers, two Americans and a Dane. They had been taking the train from St Petersburg to Warsaw and hadn’t realized that their train took a non-obvious detour through Belarus. There are no immigration checks at the Russian-Belarus border, so they had been able to enter Belarus, but then when they were exiting at Brest they were caught by Belarus immigration. Traveling in Belarus without a visa: not a good situation! They were removed from the train and delayed for two days in Brest. They were finally allowed to exit after signing “a big stack of forms” and paying moderate fines (about $200 for the American couple) for having entered Belarus illegally.

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