Khiva

The name is Fuck. John Fuck.

Sips martini.

There's only one hotel that foreigners are allowed to stay in when you visit Pyongyang. It's on a goddamned island in the city which is completely cut off at night so you can't go wandering around. I was there in 2009, and people said that it had internet access but word was that the connection was really shitty.

The hotel also had a barber shop, nightclub, casino, bar, brewery, golf course and like 20 empty, unfinished and presumably haunted floors.

Edit: North Korea story time! So on our last night in Pyongyang our whole group went to the Karaoke room in the hotel with our guides and did our best to sing a mix of English songs and the Korean songs we'd learned on the tour. There were only maybe a half dozen English songs on the machine, so after depleting our supply we drunkenly decided to forge ahead by singing a song purely from memory. After some consultation, the only song we could collectively piece together was Bohemian Rhapsody, which we performed in its entirety for our North Korean guides.

They asked for another song, but we struggled to come up with another that anyone could remember all of the lyrics to. That's when it hit me. "Okay," I announced, "I'll gonna need two dancing girls, a beat, and a mic." I told the male North Koreans that they were to say "Yeah!" when I pointed at them, and the same to our demure (and incredibly beautiful) North Korean guide. Then I wrote down a mysterious phrase on a piece of paper, and told her that when I pointed at her twice, she was to say the line.

"Baby got back?" she asked. "What does it mean?"

"Oh. You'll see."

You can see a couple photos of our guide here. Also in there is one of the guides playing Street Fighter Alpha on my Gameboy Advance, and a roller coaster loop-the-loop that we successfully dared each other to go on. Funny story about the roller coaster - you know how most rides you get on, you pull down the safety bar and it snaps into place? Well I sit down, pull down my safety bar, then just to test it a bit I push it back up. It goes a little ...then a little more ....then I push it all the way back up. Fucker doesn't snap into place at all. I tried to get someone's attention. "Hey, I think mine might be broke-" POOM. And we're off.

This is encouraging news, my only disappointment is that we just blew our chance to make every single question in this AMA about the movie Willow.

I could have (over)cooked my 4th of July burger on top of that burn.

Just want to point out that, if this were an RPG, someone that smart and that jacked would have to get removed as it would completely unbalance the game.