indiana jones and the hotel of doom pt. 2

Hey, remember last summer, when I blogged about the "hotel of doom," the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea? To sum it up, the 105 story building (the World Trade Center was 110 stories, to give perspective) was originally planned to be built in 1989, and would've housed 3,000 hotel rooms, 7 revolving restaurants, and a number of night clubs and casinos. Unfortunately, the country simply ran out of money to continue construction. Even more unfortunate was the fact that it was cheaper to leave the building standing as opposed to tearing it down, so instead they left its empty concrete shell standing for the next 21 or so years, looking something like this:

The building was originally planned to be built out of spite and jealousy towards South Korea, where Seoul had been chosen to host the 1988 Olympics. Clearly, their "me-too!" attitude fell short, and as a result, you have this garguntuan concrete testament of what never was standing over the North Korean capital.

However, in April 2008, some nice construction company named Orascom decided to take on this project, and planned to finally finish construction by 2012. You see, this particular company is responsible for the construction of the Burj Dubai, what would be world's tallest building at bout 800 meters high (that's about 2,600 feet tall, or about half a mile). So, in late 2008, they even started putting windows up:


ehhhh. it kinda looks prettier.

But don't take my word for it.

"I'm just trying to break the Asian-American stereotype. We're not all doctors and lawyers. I'm a car mechanic, I don't own a dry cleaners and I'm not a ninja."
-KK