One of the things that you know
before you go there
is that there it is a country
with a personality cult
there's pictures of grandfather,
father and son,
so that's Kim Il-sung,
Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, the current leader.
Absolutely everywhere.
By the end of the week I started
to find it quite creepy
these sort of permanent smiles
that you couldn't challenge or question.
Even just spending seven days
inside a personality cult is quite overwhelming,
quite disturbing ...
You have to accept reporting conditions there
that you would probably wouldn't accept anywhere else.
You're constantly accompanied
by minders,
although they don't like being called minders.
In our case,
two very nice guys
called Mister Kim and Mister Lee.
We were never officially told
we couldn't go anywhere without them
but it was made pretty clear
that we were not to leave the hotel.
And they organised a very packed
schedule from early in the morning until late at night.
We went to a water park,
to a zoo, to a funfair,
to a stamp museum ...
And it was sort of interesting
because
it felt very much like they were trying to show us
a very specific image of
ordinary life in Pyongyang.
I think if you look at lot of reporting
from North Korea is often focused
on sort of regimented mass events
and we'd actually asked to see some of that
because that's obviously a big part of life
in North Korea.
People have to do a lot of stuff kind of in unison.
But none of those requests were actually met.
So we only saw the capital,
which everybody who studies North Korea
says it is a different world from the rest
of North Korea.
It's a city of this quite
almost surreal apartment blocks
and they really seemed to love pastel colours.
And it's all arranged so that
real life happens around the back.
So it's almost like the main streets
are show fronts.
The Bag factory was next to the back of
one of these apartment blocks.
When we were going back to the bus
I just sort of wondered off to have a look.
There were some people taking coal deliveries,
there were some people
with armbands sitting outside
a little sign maybe for a shop,
selling things.
My first indication,
that this was maybe a little bit sensitive,
was two women started to get
quite cross with me.
And then the guides,
who'd been somewhere else,
came sort of running over and said:
'No, no, you can't take pictures here,
you've got to get back on the bus.'
And I realised later,
it's part of this sort of
desire to show this very manicured, 
manufactured
perfected image of North Korean society
and also maybe they don't want you to sort of
understand some of the details of control.
And later found out that North Korea apparently
has residents' committees,
usually older women,
to check that their dress fits what North Korea's
sort of unofficial standards
consider acceptable.
We were there for the anniversary of Kim Il-sung's
birthday which is known as the day of the sun,
and is something like a sort of
North Korean Christmas really.
North Koreans strenuously deny that
it's a religion
but it has pretty much all the trappings
of a religion
including even a kind of nativity myth.
There's a village just on the outskirts
of Pyongyang which is meant to be where
Kim Il-sung was born.
People go there to pay homage,
to leave flowers,
they go to the well and drink
some of the revolutionary water to make themselves
revolutionary and put some of it
into bottles and take it away.
And then this little sort of farmers cove,
you see it reproduced all over the country
in paintings, in posters ...
While we were there it was the centrepiece
and the theme of the Kimilsungia
and Kimjongilia flower festival
that happens every year in Pyongyang.
North Koreans take these flowers
really seriously.
You can buy books of how to sort of identify
a perfect Kimilsungia, a perfect Kimjongilia
in bloom ...
And families are there and everybody's
sort of enjoying looking at the flowers
taking pictures of each other,
taking pictures of their family.
Mr Kim and Mr Lee,
they wouldn't always translate things
so it soon became evident after,
I think just a day or two
that nobody in Pyongyang
knew that Kim was planning to meet with Trump.
And whenever we tried to ask questions
about that,
they would refuse to translate it
or they would say this is not a time for asking
political questions.
They would never outright say,
'nobody knows about this'
or 'you're not allowed to do it.'
They would just be incredibly evasive.
Here's this summit that's billed
as sort of crucial for world peace
and you know, a big step
that Kim is sort of talking up internationally,
but domestically,
his own people have no idea that it's gonna happen.
You know, it gives you a sense of
how incredibly shut off
from the rest of the world people are there.
We were taken to a lot of sort of places
where people were having fun.
And obviously at the back of your mind
there's always a question.
Is all of this put on,
is all of this a show for me?
I feel like you do get a sense of life
in Pyongyang.
I think that I had to keep reminding myself
that this is a tiny portion of the country,
this was the elite of the elite,
the people that are lucky enough to live in Pyongyang.
Probably 10% of North Korean
experts estimate that have sort of a relatively
comfortable life.
But at the same time,
it was interesting and important to see
this other side of life.
Because it's very, very, very hard
to leave North Korea.
And if you do leave,
your family are often punished for it.
So there is a lot of people in North Korea
who perhaps don't want to be there
or might want to go somewhere else
but don't really feel they have any choice.
I think the thing we can't forget
when we are thinking about difficult places
whether that's a sort of extreme dictatorship
like North Korea or a war zone like Syria,
is people do try to sort of squeeze
what enjoyment they can from life
if there's any chance of that.
There's a lot of ordinary people
who are just trying to get on with their lives,
get their children to school ...
And they're not willing to take the risk of being
captured,
sent to a labour camp, perhaps executed.
Or they don't want to leave all their family
behind,
their cousins, their parents, their siblings ...
So many phones in Pyongyang.
Everywhere we went,
people were taking selfies, snapping away ...
I mean in that sense you sort of could have
been anywhere ...
The amount of phones and sort
of enthusiasm for using them.
North Korea is sealed but it's
not as sealed as it used to be.
You know, information does come in,
there's a lot of evidence that a lot of North Koreans
are watching South Korean soap operas.
The penalty for doing that is incredibly high,
you are risking arrest, being sent to a labour camp
even execution,
but people do it anyway.
Some of the experts I spoke to after I left,
I thought had a interesting perspective
which was that Kim knew that awareness
of this world was reaching into North Korea.
That there was some understanding,
even if it was very limited of what people could
access in the outside world.
That they had internet,
that they could look all the things online.
So, he was sort of creating a North Korean
version of that society,
co-opting the elite, or limiting their discontent
because what they have might not be as good
as what you have outside North Korea
but they can look at that and think
that actually: 'I have a smartphone,
I can take pictures'.
I mean that speaks I think to something
we saw
everywhere we went in Pyongyang,
which is that Kim Jong-un is trying to create
for a tiny elite,
but for an elite who are essential to his continuation
in power,
a sort of simulacrum of
a western consumer society.
We went to a shoe factory
where there was a sort of display shelf
of what looked like western shoes ...
And so, we asked about it:
'What are these shoes doing here?'
And they said:
'They were given to us by the dear leader,
Kim Jong-un,
to inspire us to make better shoes.'
You think North Korea really is facing off
with the west
as you know, sort of attacking America,
condemning America, criticising America,
not trying to copy American trainers.
Unusual sole for a sports' shoe.
I mean, one of the big questions
people always ask is:
'Should you even go to North Korea?
Is there any point given it is so stage managed
that you'll be sort of constantly watched?'
So you are constantly second guessing
how much of this is real,
how much of this has been
set up for me to see,
to sort of trick me essentially.
But at the same time, as a journalist,
I do actually feel there is a purpose
and a sense in going to places like this
even if all you're seeing is what they want
to present you with.
Their choice of what to show you,
the questions even that you aren't allowed
to ask can be so revealing.
Occasionally,
you would sort of go through a back street
and catch a glimpse of another world,
you know, a sort of homemade
tractor cobbled together from parts or things like that.
But mostly we were being shown
this very glitzy front of a country
where there are still people going hungry
and where there's absolutely appalling
human rights abuses ...
One of the worst networks of sort of
concentration
and labour camps that exist anywhere
in the world.
One of the cruelest, harshest regimes,
one of the strictest political
punishment systems ...
So, it was trying to balance
the chance to get at least a glimpse of North Korea,
to have some sense of life there,
of how Kim Jong-un is trying
to change North Korea
while maintaining himself in power
without as a journalist forgetting the
fact this was a very manufactured fun.
So we were constantly trying to sort of balance
those two things.
