Kim Jong-un: How Swiss Boarding School Shaped Kim Jong Un
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Not to his old friends in Switzerland where Kim was a student in the late 1990s. To them he’s still just the kid who had a good sense of humor, obsessed over basketball, especially the Chicago Bulls, and got along with everyone despite flashes of temper.
Even after almost 20 years, Joao Micaelo, now a chef at a Bern restaurant, remembers fondly his former classmate at the German-speaking Liebefeld-Steinhölzli public school in Koeniz, just south of Bern. Like everyone else who knew Kim from 1998 to late 2000, Micaelo thought he was “Pak Un,” the son of a staffer at the North Korean embassy. One day Kim told Micaelo who he was, but Micaelo thought he was making it up.
“He was a good friend,” Micaelo told The Daily Beast. “We had a lot of fun together. He was a good guy. Lots of kids liked him. I don’t know anything about his life today. All I know is the guy I knew in school. He loved basketball. We played a lot together. I’d like to say to him, if you ever have the time, please contact me again so we can catch up.”
“He was funny,” former classmate Marco Imhof of Bern said. “Always good for a laugh. He also hated to lose. Winning was very important.”
“He had a sense of humor and got on well with everyone, even those pupils who came from countries who were enemies of North Korea,” another former classmate told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. “Politics were a taboo subject at school. We argued about [soccer] football, not politics.”
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