North Korea Opens Luxury Ski Resort
Maybe it’s the snow piled up outside my window, or maybe it’s the fact that I find North Korean organized-crowd scenes to be unbearably camp. Whatever the reason, this morning I found myself watching the ceremony inaugurating the opening of a new luxury ski resort in North Korea. (The clip is in Korean, a language I realize neither you nor I understand.) From the look of things, long lines at the lifts should not be a problem. The project is called The Masik Pass Ski Pass resort, and it is of course the brain-child of North Korea’s fearless leader Kim Jong Un. Masik is un peu controversial: In a country that struggles to feed its own people, what on earth was the point of building a luxury ski resort? Some have suggested that, with South Korea set to host the Winter Olympics in 2018, Kim Jong Un wanted to show that North Korea was just as capable of staging such events.
