So, President Trump was in the neighborhood.

In Korea, fog cancelled Trump’s trip to the DMZ, thereby saving him from an activity that one administration official had earlier commented as ‘becoming a little bit of a cliché’.

Be that as it may, the visit of American Presidents to the capital of China is never cliché. Essayist Eliot Weinberger has written a wonderful little piece, ‘Tales of Diplomacy: The Great Wall’, summing up the visits of Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W., and Barack Obama to the Beijing landmark. The Donald didn’t visit the wall this time, leaving it up to Melania Trump to pick up the flag.

Instead he focused on another Beijing fixture, the Forbidden City, where he dined and gave a shout out to 8,000 years of Egyptian civilization.

Mao Zedong once said: ‘He who has never been to the Great Wall is not a true man’ (不到长城非好汉).

And in Vietnam Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin. Putin has been to the Great Wall of China.

Putin has also visited China’s Shaolin Temple. The scene below could probably be a pretty good start to a Hong Kong kung fu movie.

On our blog, we also started a new series, ‘A Pyongyang Marathon Runner’s Guide’, in which we will be introducing, in detail, sights, locations, history, and culture along the 21.5 km marathon return course. Here are the links to the first three:

· Introduction

· The Host City

· Kim Il Sung Stadium

We also posted about some really old set of dinosaur footprints in Korea dating back 80 million years (that’s 8,000 years x 10,000).

There is also a new ‘Koryo’ bar in the neighborhood (unaffiliated with Koryo Tours in any way), run by Korean-Chinese from Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China. We'll tell you more once we check it out!

For real time updates during the week, follow us on Facebook (@koryotours) and on Instagram (ID: koryotours).