5 Things You Didn't Know About North Korea

North Korea hosts the World's Largest Stadium, seating 150,000 people. 

Currently used for football and athletic matches, but most often for Arirang performances --a.k.a. "the Mass Games"-- the May Day Stadium can seat 150,000, the largest of its kind. 

Located in Pyongyang, it was finished in 1989. In the late 1990s, a number of North Korean army generals implicated in an assassination attempt on Kim Jong-il were executed via burning in the stadium.

 

MARIJUANA is legal and is not even classified as a drug.

There is no taboo around smoking pot in North Korea. Many locals know the drug and smoke it regularly. The use and distribution of hard drugs like crystal meth is condemned by death penalty, yet Marijuana is reportedly neither classified as illegal or in any way policed. The herb of the bohemian and the free is not even considered a drug. As a result, it's the discerning North Korean gentleman's roll-up of choice, suggesting that, for weed smokers at least, North Korea might just be paradise after all.

 

North Korea is the world's only nation to currently have a captured U.S. Navy ship.

 

On January 23, 1968, in international waters more than 15 miles from North Korea, the USS Pueblo, an electronic intelligence ship, was surrounded by sub chasers and torpedo boats, with MiG jets overhead. The sailors on the Pueblo were rounded up and put in prison camps. While the North produced propaganda footage showing fair treatment, the reality was much worse. The crew endured starvation and torture for nearly a year.

Eventually, the North Korean government decided to release all crew members. The Pueblo is still held by North Korea and remains the second-oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy.

 

 

On the border, there's a GHOST city to encourage South Koreans to enter.

 

According to the Korean government, the village of Kijongdong, located in the North's half of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), contains a 200-family collective farm, serviced by a childcare center, kindergarten, primary and secondary schools, and a hospital. However, observation from the South suggests that it's actually a ghost town, created to encourage South Korean defection. Until 2004, massive loudspeakers mounted on several of the buildings continuously delivered DPRK propaganda broadcasts relating the North's virtues in great detail and urging disgruntled soldiers and farmers to simply walk across the border to be received as brothers. Eventually, as its value in inducing defections proved minimal, the content was switched to condemnatory anti-Western speeches, Communist agitprop operas, and patriotic marching music for up to 20 hours a day.

 

For 20 years, the world's tallest hotel was a 105-story empty pyramid in Pyongyang.

 

 With 105 floors, the Ryugyong Hotel was designed to be the world's tallest hotel at the end of the 80s, but the construction was halted in 1992 as the country entered a period of economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Japanese newspapers estimated the cost of the hotel at $750 million, which is 2% of North Korea's GDP. For over a decade, the unfinished building sat vacant and without windows, fixtures, or fittings, appearing as a massive concrete shell. In the late 1990s, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Korea inspected the building and concluded that the structure was "irreparable."