I was just in the UPS store and a Korean gentleman said he wanted to mail a letter to Korea. The clerk asked him “North or South?”. The Korean guy almost laughed, but said “South” and then “You can’t mail a letter to North Korea.” I wondered aloud about this as well and the clerk said that he had read the regulations and you can actually mail letters to North Korea, but it can’t have anything in it about the United States, democracy, etc. So, I decided to look this up online and sure enough, here are the US Postal Service’s Country Conditions for Mailing – Korea, Democratic People’s Republic of (North Korea). I am pretty sure all mail gets routed there through Hong Kong.

My Korean friends, however, say that no mail is getting in there, so who knows what is really going on. Still, I wonder if 99% of the public realize how screwed up that country really is.