At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

Near the Monument to the Foundation of the Korean Workers’ Party, a group of North Korean dancers waits to be dismissed by their supervisors.

No posts in the last few weeks due to a trip out to the West Coast, but I now have plenty more photos to post and write about from Big Sur, San Francisco, Redwood National Park, Oregon, Seattle, and Vancouver. And back to the Photo of the Day, which shows a group of North Korean [...]

This is a statue of a worker, peasant, and intellectual in front of the Tower of Juche Idea in Pyongyang, North Korea. I found this statue to be quite similar to Vera Mukhina’s “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” statue in Moscow.

A sculpture of DPRK soldiers in the style of socialist realism, located near the Mansudae Grand Monument to Kim Il-Sung in Pyongyang, North Korea.

The Statue of Liberty – the iconic symbol of freedom that greeted millions of immigrants to their new home in the United States. Dedicated in 1886, the statue was a gift to the U.S. from the people of France. This photo was taken in August 2008, when I met up with my dad and brother [...]

In Teatralnaya Square, directly across the street from the Bolshoi Theatre stands Moscow’s last remaining monument to Karl Marx, which was erected in 1961. The inscription reads “Proletariat of all countries, solidarity!” (aka “Workers of the world, unite!”) While the Communist Party still occasionally rallies around the monument, some have suggested replacing the monument with, [...]

A statue of Mother Armenia located in Yerevan’s Haghtanak (Victory) Park.

In Slavic mythology, Berehynia is a female spirit who serves as the “hearth mother, protectoress of the home”. This monument to Berehynia is located in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev, Ukraine.

In case my explanation was insufficient, below is the footage of our trip to the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery from the North Korean tourism DVD. It includes the usual laying of flowers, bowing, etc.

Located on Mt. Taesong, just a short drive from the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, is the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery, the final resting place of Koreans who died fighting the Japanese during their occupation of the Korean peninsula. As with our visit to Mansudae, our group was asked to purchase several bouquets of flowers to lay at [...]