Because North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jung Un, thinks what his country really needs right now is not more food or electricity, but a multimillion dollar ski-resort, construction has begun on the Masik Pass ski resort.

Tucked away in the secluded depths of North Korea’s east coast, Masik Pass will be home to two main hotels – a 250-room, eight-storey building for foreigners and a 150-room hotel for Koreans – as well as an underground parking lot, employee housing, access bridges, a pumping station and, of course, ski-lifts.

We can make nuclear weapons and rockets, we can build a ski lift.

Thousands of teenaged soldier-workers dressed in drab olive-coloured uniforms are “carrying out their daily quotas at more than 200 percent” to get the resort ready. They can be seen carrying large blocks of concrete on their backs and pounding the stone with hammers while minivans blast patriotic music into the crisp mountain air through loudspeakers.

Who will use this ski-resort you ask? Well, Kim Jung Un for one, who reportedly enjoyed skiing as a teenager studying in Switzerland. By the estimate of a North Korean ski official (yes, they exist) there are only about 5,500 North Korean skiers in the country of 24 million – a skiing population of 0.02 percent. The resort will be a playground for the nation’s elite and a trickle of eccentric tourists.

Please enjoy these photos of how the construction is going so far. The aforementioned ski official said that this is his country at work. It is proof of the great love of the great leader.

[Source : CBS]