Ryu2.mind

I left my apartment today, grabbed a hot chocolate and blueberry cheesecake at Starbucks, and went on my merry way to work. Shanghai is finally warming up, and I can actually walk briskly and feel warm now as I do the 25-minute walk from my apartment to work.

The route always takes me by the Jing An Hilton. Normally, there's not much -- the entrance is just like any Hilton in the world, and usually, there are a few taxis in the queue and a JAL bus parked outside with tourists from our island neighbor to the East.

Today though, I see a North Korean flag flying over the Hilton. This piqued my interest, as last I checked, the Hilton hadn't been bought out by the North Koreans yet.

The other thing I quickly noticed was that the place is teeming with police. Not the 交通办管, jiaotong banguan, traffic assistants whose job consists of little more than blowing a whistle at completely arbitrary times, but real 警察, jingcha, police. On every street corner and intersection, there was at least one, usually two, holding up traffic of all kinds, barking at pedestrians to get back and making the place devoid of the usual Shanghai free-for-all traffic chaos.

Some of them had guns as well. In China, that definitely means something big is going on.

I wanted to whip out my camera, but for the above reason, quickly decided it probably wasn't the best idea and suppressed my shutterbug instincts for once...

Then I noticed a lot of people going off to a black cars parked off to the side. Each car had a driver and someone else. They were full-sized sedans except for one, a stretch Mercedes limo with a North Korean flag attached to the front right.

The person who got in the Mercedes didn't look like Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, but he was obviously some high ranking official. Standing off to the side with a few other bystanders, unable to get closer, I managed take a quick look at him. And he seemed to stare back fleetingly at me, just some guy in the blue sweater toting a Starbucks cup, but enough for me to see a face and eyes solid, and without emotion.

In my brief brush with NK leadership, I did not feel he seemed cold or evil like a Westerner might imagine from reading about NK in the media -- but what struck me was the fact that he seemed absolutely devoid of emotional signs, one way or the other.

Then, like that, they drove off one by one in a motorcade of probably 10 cars in all, plus a bunch of Chinese police cars and motorcycles leading and trailing them.

Who could it be, I wondered? When I got to work a few minutes later, I did some searching on the usual Chinese government websites, and sure enough, found this article.

And that was my commute to work today.