The Mangyongdae Schoolchildren's Palace in Pyongyang is an imposing building with a grand marble foyer (and a large model of the space shuttle in the foyer bearing North Korean insignia and flags!) with hundreds of classrooms where 5,000 talented children receive private lessons every day from 700 teachers in everything from music, art, science, computers and sports (there is even an Olympic size indoor swimming pool inside the Children’s Palace with full-size diving boards).

I took this photograph in one of the classrooms where children were being taught how to play a traditional Korean musical instrument called the 'kayagum'. The kayagum is a movable-bridge 13-string zither similar to but larger than the basic Chinese zheng. The teachers are predominantly female and all wear traditional Korean dress (somewhat of a contrast to the casual dress that teachers wear in western countries these days, I thought).