PYONGYANG, North Korea — The hulking 105-story Ryugyong Hotel dominating this capital city's skyline is a fitting metaphor for a crippled nation.
The massive concrete pyramid, topped by several tiers of would-be revolving restaurants, stands unfinished. Years after construction came to an abrupt halt, cranes still hover nearby like a giant's fishing rods.
Like the hotel, seen on an illicit outing in one of the world's most paranoid countries, nearly everything in North Korea these days seems to have come to a standstill or, at best, a crawl.
Power outages routinely disrupt life, trapping subway passengers for hours in darkness and forcing residents to walk as many as two dozen flights to reach their high-rise apartments.
Doctors perform operations without anesthesia and recycle beer bottles to hold intravenous fluids. Sanitary conditions in hospitals are atrocious: In unheated operating rooms lighted by candles, patients shiver and blood freezes on the floors.
Most factories are idle. They lack not only energy and raw materials but spare parts to replace the decades-old machinery procured from former allies in the Eastern Bloc.
And although the famine that peaked two years ago appears to be largely over, the rural population is still barely scraping by. Residents just a few miles outside Pyongyang could be seen picking up grains of rice on the roadside next to a rice field Tuesday afternoon. Women lugged heavy bags of potatoes and vegetables on their backs, heading home from the capital on journeys that can be as long as 100 miles.
In a rare move, North Korea this week allowed American journalists into the country to cover Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's mission to improve U.S. relations with the nation accurately known as the hermit kingdom. What emerged--based on numerous interviews with international humanitarian aid workers here and a firsthand, non-government-sanctioned look at the city and surrounding countryside--was a nation in severe crisis.
That expedition, which involved dodging various "minders," or guides, and hiding out in a store whose main offering appeared to be commemorative stamps of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il and his late father, "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, was led by a German doctor who has helped rehabilitate five hospitals here.
As fragile as everything seems to be, somehow the nation continues to defy expectations that it would simply disintegrate under hardships exacerbated by drought and floods in the past few years.
