I can’t really tell as I am not fluent enough, but one of my fellows during the trip shared some experiences from her past travels with the Goethe Institute. I was wondering why she never spoke Korean with anyone during the trip.

When I asked her why, she gave two reasons: One was the strange behaviour people showed towards her as a Korean-looking woman (she is German with a Korean background), so she only conversed in English with the North Koreans. The second reason was that the language was so different that she could only barely understand half of what was being said. We had a special translator from the embassy.

(The picture is a photo I made of the automatic translation software that was developed at the Pyongyang Informatics Centre to ease access to information.)

(by Aram Pan)

Behind the scenes, however, is a shadow world of knowledge. Only accessible to the privileged. Interestingly they have literature that should not be available to them.

In addition to many books that published in the South I found many standard books on computer science in English. These books, are a challenge to many, though. That is true for the wealth of information on the internet, which seeps through the information firewall as well.

Thus, one of the projects shown to me proudly was a translation software. Fortunately I had a translator with me I trusted, and my simple test seemed to work pretty well. However, I am sure it helps a lot for the formalised science books out there.

Spring in Korea is not actually cold. However, March in North Korea is a difficult month for visiting. Due to energy shortage it can be quite cold inside. The thermometer above shows the temperature inside the reading room where the librarian also has her desk*. Not really a good place to work, even though for books it’s perfect.

During the preparation, our delegation lead warned me to not take off my coat inside buildings. And he was right! Try to sit in a room at 15ºC (~59ºF) in a meeting for an hour.

* Actually, the Goethe Institute had organized a gas-powered heater for her.

It’s not like you would have access to the network anywhere. However, the reading room of the Goethe Institute even had a web site featuring the catalogue and an introduction to the library.

The network has a home page with all kinds of information including a sharing network for apartments and other places to live. While our librarian rarely left Pyongyang, she was able to access the libraries catalogue remotely from Hamhung. Pretty impressive for a country that only sometimes has electricity.

However, the most interesting finding was back in Pyongyang at the actual library. Here, after a power outage, the local catalogue computer rebooted and it didn’t boot into the usual Windows XP kiosk with the catalogue. For some reason it went straight into a local version of Linux: Red Star OS 1.0. I didn’t dare to fiddle with it as there were too may prying eyes around.

This Arch of Triumph is actually a few meters higher than the one in Paris and right next to it, we found this:

You could actually rent inline skates at this location. As I remember, this were about the only people having fun, except maybe when we had a lot of alcohol with our escort.

I moved as well, first to London and later back to Berlin. Worked there for some years and then took off to Seoul, only to move back to Berlin. However, I lost a lot of friends in the process because it was difficult to keep track.

My first social network involved a text based virtual reality game where you had a persistent avatar and could interact with people from all over the world. Only much later with the invention of instant messaging and finally services such as LinkedIn and Xing was it possible to keep in touch without much hassle. I even managed to find some old friends again.

However, there is also another side to social networking and networking in general. It is very important no to connect with everyone you just met. For me, it was always important to establish not only a purely professional relationship with my contacts. That means to contact them now and then and talk about what has happened, even share a bit of my private life.

It would probably be difficult to follow the advice. LinkedIn gives in the article from the tweet below, because you would never connect to newcomers in your network.

Who connect with on LinkedIn? LinkedIn says "Connect with people who can vouch for you, and whom you can vouch for" http://t.co/eF1FK8ymSn

— Konstantin Guericke (@kgimvalley) February 28, 2014

I am always astonished how close I am to persons I would like to contact and where I actually have a chance to be introduced by one of my direct contacts. That would be difficult with those contacts who probably wouldn’t even remember me anymore after all these years, because we just met at some remote conference.

For me the question is, will I continue to stay in contact with that person? And that means actually talking now and then. A stale connection without communication is worth nothing, like taking a picture of a person we asked for an address on the street. Just like in many areas of our life, it is important to keep in mind: we are all human.