tahituatara

Have you considered how you'll explain what prostitution is if they do find something out? I remember reading a study from Amsterdam where they interviewed kids who walked past the red windows every day on the way to/from kindergarten. The kids were apparently quite articulate about loneliness and said that the women in the windows were "selling their kisses to lonely people". I think that's kinda sweet ♥

This is my favourite comment so far in this thread. It's how I feel when I watch animals (or children, actually) playing and just doing things for the joy of doing them.

Simple pleasures like splashing water or dropping a sycamore seed. Feeling wind in your hair or spinning until you get dizzy. Burying your fingers in thick grass and gripping tight or squelching through mud with bare feet and feeling it slide between your toes.

I live in New Zealand and everyone is making jokes about avoiding Chinese people like the virus makes racism OK... It's awful. Like I get that what they mean is "people who have been home to China for the holiday could carry the disease if they aren't careful" but it is so not OK that what they say is "stay away from Chinese people ha ha ha!"

The peppermint is the BEST for summer. Cools you down even more than cool water.

DPRK also send teams to the Olympics. Some have defected in the past but they are rarely given the opportunity. At the Rio Olympics they all got free smartphones from Samsung, they got confiscated.

I think most North Korean sports people would feel that they were contributing to the status of their country, and could probably look forward to a pretty cushy life for them and their families once they got home. If you had been raised indoctrinated and knew your family would be better off if you came home, it'd have to be a special person to get enough status to be sent overseas and then defect.