Where Koreans Go to Reunify (Hint: It’s Not The Koreas)
SIEM REAP, Cambodia — At a roadside restaurant here near the sprawling ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, busloads of South Korean tourists file in to witness an unexpectedly exotic spectacle: doll-faced North Korean women performing everything from saccharine ballads to a rousing number from Bizet’s “Carmen.”
South Koreans visit Siem Reap in greater numbers than any other nationality, according to the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism. Last year, more than 260,000 of them came here, accounting for 16 percent of all foreign visitors.
“Everyone is very excited,” said Jung Myong-ho, a South Korean tour guide watching the show one recent evening. “Back in South Korea, we don’t have any opportunities to meet North Korean people.”
Northerners and Southerners pose shoulder to shoulder, a moment of cross-border kinship captured with the latest South Korean gadgetry.
On the menu are specialties ranging from the obvious (kimchi) to the more obscure (dog meat casserole), all prepared by a team of five North Korean chefs.
They requested that a reporter and photographer, the only non-Asian clientele in the restaurant, delete photographs of the restaurant from their cameras.
But perhaps more notable is what is missing from the restaurant. There are no propaganda posters, no slogans and no portraits of Kim Jung-un, or his father or his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the previous great leaders. The waitresses avoid any discussion of politics.
Mr. Jung, the South Korean tour guide, said the restaurant was a kind of neutral ground for North and South Koreans to meet. Inside the restaurant “politics disappear,” Mr. Jung said. “We are one family.”
The warm feelings seem to be helped along by ample orders of Cambodian beer and the fact that nearly all the South Korean patrons are in vacation mode.
A meal at a Pyongyang restaurant is one of the more expensive in town. In a country where a bowl of noodles costs $1.50, a hungry customer can easily pay $100 for a simple meal of kimchi, beef shoulder, stir-fried squid and a bottle of wine.
“Dashi man nap shida!” the North Korean performers say. “See you again!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/world ... bodia.html
