Occupants of ordinary Pyongyang apartments usually share the same occupations, and 30-40 households comprise a people's unit. Devoid of their own management offices, dong or village offices administer apartments. The residents, on a rotation basis, do street cleaning and sweeping, and in winter, snow is removed by labor provided by one person from each household.

Apartment entrance guard duties also rotate among the residents. Guards stand on duty in a four square-meter entrance guard office from morning till 8:00pm, checking and recording all visitors.

After sending their husbands to their jobs and their children to kindergartens or schools, housewives gather at the guard office to share gossips and jokes all day long. All sorts of topics are raised there; who has visited whom and what has taken place there; what kinds of goods have been brought by whom; whose children have done what sorts of mischief at school. Since no secrets can be kept, quarrels often develop.

Affection shared among neighbors in everyday life, however, is deep. It's especially so with regard to refrigerators. If one gets fresh fish or meat, she has it preserved in a neighbor's refrigerator. No one rejects such a request.

The economic woes hitting the North since the mid-1990s have brought about lots of changes in the life of apartment dwellers; elevators don't function normally, little room heating is available, and the water supply is disrupted. Elevators are installed in Pyongyang apartments of 10 floors or more, which don't operate properly due to power shortages. Households having aged parents or patients undergo indescribable hardship. Even bicycles, virtually the sole means of transportation in the capital, have become a burden for occupants of higher-floor apartments because they have to be carried up all the stairs. Electric household appliances cannot be used properly without the aid of power boosters.

If winter comes, apartments become huge "prisons" because the power supply is interrupted almost daily and central heating usually does not function. Looked at from afar, apartments don't look like people's dwellings. Except the apartments in Changgwang Street, exclusively used by ranking party and administration officials, most apartments have wooden windowpanes permitting draughts to seep into rooms. They are covered by plastic paper, but it is hard for occupants to put up with severe cold as low as minus 20 degrees centigrade. Family members crouched in quilts exchange conversations as their breath rises like cigarette smoke.

Under the name of "benevolent heating," central heating is supplied two or three days on New Year's Day and Kim Jong Il's birthday falling on February 16. Since plumbing is obsolete and has long been left unused, pipes are sometimes blocked or cracked and some households fail to get the benefits of this “benevolence.”

Potable water is supplied for one or two hours a day, and each household has no other way but to supply washing and toilet water themselves. Long queues form when apartment complexes have common-use water faucets or water pumps. It is quite arduous for households living in the upper storeys to carry water to their apartments. Apartment occupants in the Munsu Street fetch washing water from the Taedong River.

The raising of livestock such as chickens, rabbits and pigs at apartments is a new practice prompted by the acute food shortages. So long as it doesn't present too awkward appearance, authorities tacitly approve it. "While staying at the Koryo Hotel, I heard a rooster crow one morning at an apartment in front of the hotel," said a South Korean businessman who has recently been to Pyongyang. "I've later learned that they raise chickens on apartment verandas." The 45-story Koryo Hotel is located in Donghung-dong of the Jung or Central District of the capital, adjacent to the downtown Chonggwang Street that houses the central party headquarters.

(Kim Kwang-in, kki@chosun.com )