Sep 25th, 2009 at 8:00AM: China has once again closed off the borders of Tibet to foreign travelers ahead of the October 1st holiday celebrating 60 years of Communist rule. According to this story from the Associated Press, the travel ban went into effect on Tuesday and is expected to last at least until the 8th October and is the result of fears of protests and demonstrations in the Himalayan state. The article says that ...Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.
Communist posts
China closes Tibet once again
Sep 25th, 2009 at 8:00AM: China has once again closed off the borders of Tibet to foreign travelers ahead of the October 1st holiday celebrating 60 years of Communist rule. According to this story from the Associated Press, the travel ban went into effect on Tuesday and is expected to last at least until the 8th October and is the result of fears of protests and demonstrations in the Himalayan state. The article says that ...June 4 trial date for American journalists in North Korea
Outsiders not welcome at Chinese spy museum
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:00AM: Foreigners keep out!
Committed to preserving national secrets, the new Jiangsu National Security Education Museum in Nanjing is only open to Chinese citizens. So, if you want to see guns embedded in lipstick, maps hidden in decks of cards and other accoutrements of the spy trade (or, "tradecraft," as spies over here call it), you have to have the right passport.
Most of the items on display are ...Riga, Latvia: the best place you've never been
Mar 10th, 2009 at 3:00PM: A lot has changed since the Cold War ended. If this is news to you, please stop reading immediately. You don't want to drink water from a fire hose. But, if you are in fact aware that the Berlin Wall fell (and that David Hasselhoff provided the soundtrack, to the joy of Germans and the chagrin of Americans), then keep going. You're about to find out why you need to get out to Riga, Latvia.
The ...Travel read: Around the Bloc
Dec 21st, 2008 at 11:00AM: I stumbled upon Stephanie Elizondo Griest's writing on a stopover in New York City. She was reading from her third and most recent travel-related book, Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, at Book Culture near Columbia University. I was immediately struck by her engaging use of language and her savvy presence. It's a pleasant sight to behold a young, female traveler and writer who is ...Where did the commies go?
Sep 23rd, 2008 at 10:00AM: With September came the near fall of another Communitst leader, as Kim Jong Il, dictator over North Korea vanished from the limelight, joining his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro in the murky depths of unknown, fiercely hidden ailments. The realist in me knows that both leaders are gravely ill. Kim Jong Il is said to have suffered a stroke early this month and hasn't since been seen in public -- ...Beijing forces vehicle traffic to halve, subways choke
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Jul 22nd, 2008 at 11:00AM: The great thing about running a communist state is that you can dream up and enforce any crazy rule you want -- and the people can't do anything about it. China, scrambling to clean up its image as the Olympics draw closer, has been making changes to the landscape left and right -- beautifying Beijing, planting flowers and cleaning up the streets. This week, in an effort to clean up the ...Photo of the Day (5/26/08)
May 26th, 2008 at 4:30PM:
Since I am still on my Russian kick this week, I couldn't resist picking this photo from St. Petersburg by Radim.
I just saw this sight in St. Petersburg this weekend. Right outside the Alexander Nevsky Monastery are two major cemeteries. One of them houses graves of prominent Russian artists such as Dostoevsky or Rimsky-Korsakov. The other cemetery, buried in unkept grass and bushes houses ...Blogging fearlessly from Havana. How?!
May 19th, 2008 at 3:30PM: One of my favorite country blogs of all time is that of Yoani Sanchez, the 32 year old blogging secretly from Havana. To write on her blog, she has to pretend to be a tourist and go to a hotel to access the Internet. Of the 11 million people who live on the island, only about 200,000 have open access to the web -- they are mainly government employees, researchers and academics, to whom the ...Infiltrating North Korea Part 11: North Korean Style Advertising
Dec 16th, 2007 at 10:00AM: Billboards are a ubiquitous presence in most any major city. Depending on local ordnances, they may fill the entire side of a building, dominate cityscapes, or simply appear on the roadside in a variety of shapes and sizes. The city of Pyongyang is no exception. The only difference is that there is only one product being advertised here: communism. Propaganda is the evil step cousin of ...Infiltrating North Korea Part 4: The architecture of Pyongyang
Dec 9th, 2007 at 10:00AM:
Pyongyang, for the most part, is surprisingly tasteful and impressive without being too ostentatious and grandiose.
This is because Kim Il Sung, like all megalomaniacs, built his capital to showcase the power and sophistication of his regime and to serve as a shining example of Socialism's prowess.
Nonetheless, I had still expected a horribly dilapidated city much like the carcass of so many ...A Canadian in Beijing: 798 Arts District Accepts the Cultural Baton
Jun 8th, 2007 at 7:00PM:
The arts district of Beijing is called the "798" district. That's its address, to be precise. It's technically in "Da Shan Zi ???" (which is the area of the city) and this complex used to be a series of factories that have now all been converted to galleries and cafes. It's quite beautiful and peaceful there and I have been meaning to tell you about it for a while. My friend and I took the bus ...May Day in North Korea
Mar 13th, 2007 at 9:23AM: Czech travel agencies seem to have a new hit on their hands: celebration of May Day in Pyongyang, North Korea. Perhaps the last country on the planet where pompous celebrations of the communist regime are still going strong, North Korea is the hip place to go.
Apparently there are enough people either A) nostalgic enough for the spectacle of communist kitsch which seized in the Czech Republic ...
