The rude awakening isn’t what you would expect
There’s so much that we don’t know about North Korea but one thing you might not perhaps expect is the strange way that every citizen starts their day, as one keen traveler on TikTok has revealed during their visit to the incredibly secretive nation.
Travel to and from North Korea has been incredibly restricted for decades now, as the mysterious nation has remain largely closed off and isolated from the rest of the world.
Most citizens have virtually no access to the internet, and calls and messages are incredibly restricted when it comes to the ‘outside world’, which leads to everyone knowing very little about the actual daily life of North Koreans.
There have been rare opportunities for foreign visitors to travel to North Korea, often through extremely guided and restricted tours in certain parts of the country, the most recently the government finally opened up their doors to visitors for the first time in five years.
Visitors, including Zoe, have been able to travel to the remote city of Rason to experience North Korean life (Tang Ke/Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Like many countries, North Korea completely shuttered its borders following the Covid-19 outbreak, but a couple of weeks ago it reverted the change, allowing visitors into Rason – a special remote city in the northeast of North Korea.
However, things seemingly changed as the government then decided to revert this change, and now all further visits into the country have been banned. Thankfully one keen traveler managed to document her short time in Rason on TikTok, revealing one ‘shocking’ feature of daily life that you might not expect.
Shared by ‘zoediscovernk’, the video captioned ‘POV: It’s 6am in North Korea’ illustrates the rude yet somewhat pleasant awakening that all residents are subjected to in the early hours.
“Don’t you love it when the morning music wakes you up like this,” Zoe remarks while laughing, thrusting her camera outside her bedroom window to give everyone else a taste of the serene operatic music that’s blaring from nearby speakers.
Long gone are the days of being woken up by the call of a cockerel, but at least you won’t necessarily need an alarm clock to ensure you’re on time for work here!
“Is it bad [that] I wanna live there,” wonders one comment underneath the TikTok, whereas another adds: “I fear that this will be the USA soon.”
The main subject of discussion in the comments though is how she was not only able to travel to North Korea but film and upload her time there too.
As alluded to previously, she was one of the few that were able to access the country during it’s short opening window – and she also appears to be a participant of the Pyongyang Marathon as per her other TikToks, which is a ‘loophole’ that some are advised to use if they wish to enter the country.
She’s an experienced visitor of the country though, now serving as a tour guide for other travelers, and according to her website she’s visited the country over 30 times for several years.
She also openly self-censors her content in order to comply with North Korean guidelines, which allows her to continue visiting the country, and remains strictly apolitical in her coverage.
