The People’s Republic of Bulgaria had and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has their national days on the same day – 9 September.
PR Bulgaria commemorated the 1944 “September Uprising” that saw the USSR install a communist-dominanted government (since the fall of Communist Party rule, it’s no longer an official public holiday), while North Korea honours the day when in 1948 the country was founded.
I happened to be in North Korea on this day in 2012, and a week later I was in Bulgaria. My Bulgarian friends and relatives were curious to know what’s it like in North Korea and is it really like how it was in Bulgaria during the “sots” (“socialist”) period pre-1989.
Well, certainly being in North Korea did remind me of some aspects of socialist Bulgaria and the Eastern Bloc I’d forgotten about.
One of my fellow travellers was from the former GDR, so we swapped observations the others wouldn’t notice.
And what was one thing that stood out for us?
No-one in North Korea seemed to be working – lots of people were just standing around doing not much. This was much like how it was in pre-1989 Bulgaria and Eastern Bloc. Seeing there was guaranteed full employment and therefore hardly any chance of being sacked, as well as often there being multiple people doing a job one person could do quite well on their own, why would anyone want to put themselves out? As the old Eastern Bloc joke went – they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. And that also appeared the case in North Korea.
So yes, despite what may be protrayed, the North Koreans are human.
Also, when going down the bul. Tsar Osvoboditel, the main street of Kyustendil, Bulgaria I had a major case of déjà vu as the apartment blocs and the street itself looked not much different to those on the main street in Kaesong.
Ivano Giambattista, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Christophe95, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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