Don't forget Stalin World in Lithuania

Are they going to shoot people when they try to leave?

Next, the Gulag wieght loss centre.

I remember a colleague a few years back who went on holiday to Albania after the dominoes started falling; he wanted to visit a real live Communist country while there was still one left.

Maybe some enterpreneur will start up package tours to North Korea

I hear they close the park when it's 40 below :-)

(An inside joke for anyone who's read "A Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich.")

There's a park of communist sculptures removed from their locations in the centre of Budapest and to become an open-air museum outside town. It's very popular with tourists.

Back in 1991 I warned Hungarians that tourists would be disappointed if they took the big chunky red stars off the buildings [they took them off partly to follow the will of Cardinal Mindszenthy so they could bring his ashes home from Vienna].

In the centre of town, after a decade of embarrassed anonymity [a children's school in 1991 when I lived on the next block] the once-dreaded 60 Andrassy ut has been re-opened as a museum of torture. Last year it was "restored" to how it was up until the 1970s, when it was the interrogation centre for the communist secret police [and used for the same purpose before them by the fascist secret police during the last months of WWII].

I don't feel like going in that particular museum.

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The museum in Budapest is called "Terror Háza", the House of Terror. I haven't been there yet; last time I was in Budapest (last summer) I walked past it and there was a very long line of people waiting to get in. I didn't have enough time to wait, so I postponed it till the next visit. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, but it's important to see the evil that was committed.