This new Starbucks offers a rare view into North Korea

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Can’t imagine Kim Jong is gonna be too happy about this one:

A 40-seater Starbucks cafe opened last week at South Korea’s Aegibong Peace Ecopark in Gimpo city, which is along the divide between the two Koreas and just a river apart from the North.

The cafe’s location allows visitors to have an unfettered view of a small village in North Korea’s Gaepung county just 1.4km away, so near that the number of buildings in the village can be counted.

It’s true: The North Korean village is practically so close you could throw a stone and hit it (we don’t recommend doing this).

The North Korean border sits less than a mile from the Starbucks, offering views of “some 20 three-storey high buildings that look like residences, with a single-storey building that looks like a school, a plaza and rice fields near the riverbank.”

One visitor shared the sadness she felt in looking over the short but unbridgeable divide:

During her previous trips to the park, she would use the binoculars to look at North Korea and then leave without thinking too much about it, she said.

‘But now, with coffee available, it makes you linger longer, and looking over to the North makes you feel more emotional too. The two environments of North and South Korea have such stark contrasts despite being so close. It makes me feel sorrowful, and I wish I could bring them all over to the South.’

(I can’t imagine that “emotional” and “sorrowful” is what Starbucks wants customers to hear, but those are the breaks, I guess.)

Mayor Kim Byung-soo of the nearby city of Gimpo said the Western coffee chain was not put there to mock North Korea:

Despite its beauty, not many people come here because there is not enough awareness. So we are simply leveraging Starbucks’ brand power to promote this place to visitors.