HotelChatter

The hotel consists of three wings rising at 75 degree angles capped by several floors arranged in rings supposed to hold five revolving restaurants and an observation deck. A creaky building crane has for years sat unused at the top of the 3,000-room hotel in a city where tourists are only occasionally allowed to visit.

Now an Egyptian firm, the Orascom group, has started to restore the top floors of the hotel. Glass panels have been installed as have telecommunications antennas, even though North Korea forbids its citizens to own cellphones. Orascom has even put up artist renderings of what the hotel's refurbishment will look like once completed.

The construction bill could top as high as $2 billion which is about 10 percent of North Korea's economic output. And we think actually getting guests to drop money here is going to be kind of difficult. Not that we're RevPar experts or anything but that all that communism and the nuclear weapons talk is a bit of a downer.

[Photo via Architecture MNP]