After 16 years of neglect, the Doom Hotel in North Korea, aka Ryugyong Hotel, has finally been updated with some new glass windows at its peak.
Some background on this scary-looking hotel: The building was started in 1987 and planned to have 3,000 rooms inside its 105 storeys. But ultimately, the construction tab became to much for North Korea to handle and so it was left mostly abandoned for 20 years. It's never even hosted any hotel guests. But there are some improvements now being made. Reuters reports:
The peak of the 3,000-room hotel, in a country that permits few foreigners to visit, is encircled in new rings of shiny steel. Mirrored glass has yet to be affixed to the other sides of the muddish-grey concrete structure, foreigner visitors said.
The Egyptian firm, Orascom, is responsible for the face-lift but there is still no hope for this to be an actual hotel with real guests inside. Aside from the tourist restrictions, no one wants to give this building money anymore. They just want to spiff it up a little as part of North Korea's plan to become a "great and prosperous nation" by 2012.
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