Kim Jong Il’s Personal Railway Station and other Perks
Tonight I got another chance to enjoy the wonderful Boston Red Sox, who in their first game of the 2007 World Series crushed the vaunted, 21-game-streaking Colorado Rockies. Cindy surprised me by inviting two friends over to enjoy dinner and the game.
Then I spent time with my laptop, since the game wasn’t much of a contest. There I found a fascinating website after exploring the Wikipedia entry about Kim Jong il. First, I learned that the ‘dear leader’ was born in Russia, and that he has had three mistresses since his first wife, (an arranged marriage to a party higher-up’s daughter) died.
There are fifteen palaces that the Big Man gets to enjoy, and since like his father (The Great Leader) he is terrified to fly, he always travels by armored train. To get to his seaside palace, he takes that personal train and stops at his personal railway station. Yep, he has his own station that is only used once a year. It apparently is the second station built, since the first in his view was too easy to be seen from China. So that first one that his father had built was torn down and another more opulent station was built in another location, more out of view from enemy airplanes or spies.
The same website detailed the life of the party leader and dictator–he has a 10,000 bottle wine cellar, a collection of more than 20,000 videos of films like James Bond, and other action titles, and his taste for cognac costs the state more than $700,000 a year. Oh the things you can find out on a laptop late at night!
June 4, 2011 @ 2:21 am
Mind-boggling. How does anyone, even with lavish parties peopled by the elite, consume $700,000 a year in cognac?
At first I thought this sounded unbelievable but only a little bit of reading on other sites soon changed my mind. I’ve seen him described as a “a caricature of a diminutive playboy, a comic picture at odds with his brutal regime” and “a vain, paranoid, cognac-guzzling hypochondriac.” On Wikipedia I read that he has US$4 billion stashed in European banks in case he ever needs to flee North Korea.
It would be interesting to see a picture of his personal railway station.