Pyongyang

The capital of North Korea and the base for the whole of Harry’s second day. He stays on the outskirts, in the industrial belt, with a balcony view over factories and the city beyond.

The two halves of the page are the two ways he sees the city: an itinerary arranged for him, and then a marathon route that goes wherever the marathon goes.

Obs: the subtitles render several proper nouns only phonetically. The tower and the main square are named here from context and from the video’s own chapter list; the underlying transcript is unreliable on spellings.

Days one and two

From First Tourist in North Korea’s Capital After 5 Years 🇰🇵, the arrival and the first guided day.

• The city was rebuilt from nothing. It was destroyed by bombing in the war, so everything standing is about sixty years old — which Harry says explains the scale and the uniformity of it.
• His first impression contradicts what he expected: clean, grand and quiet, with propaganda visible from the moment they leave the airport. He returns to the cleanliness repeatedly and unfavourably to British cities — and then stops and argues the other side himself, that he is being shown a chosen district.
• The hotel, toured at length: entirely 1970s, his room found already unlocked, a wall fixture he cannot identify and jokes about, a bed he compares to concrete, real plants, a balcony, a thermometer reading 22°, and an old bathroom that works. His verdict is that it is a good hotel. A photograph of the leader’s visit hangs downstairs, with a line on the floor visitors may not cross. The balcony view is a factory.
• The founders’ monument, the country’s most sacred site and the first stop: statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, flanked by monuments to the independence struggle against Japan. Visitors buy flowers — $5 — and bow. Harry is visibly careful here and says so. The statues have been altered over the years to look more smiling and don’t closely resemble the men.
• The Monument to the Workers’ Party — hammer, sickle and calligraphy brush, for workers, farmers and intellectuals, with inscriptions inside.
• A bar on a Friday night, for the city’s own beer, which he is told is brewed on equipment bought from a British brewery that went bankrupt and shipped over whole. He is also told the leader has visited the bar three times. Obs: the transcript renders the beer’s name three different ways, so it is not written out here.
• A brand-new street named after an intercontinental ballistic missile. Every balcony on it is empty and no lights are on; Harry asks aloud why the buildings appear unoccupied and gets no answer. A screen on the street plays at enormous volume.

The metro

Its own section because it is the best-observed thing in the first video.

• Described as the deepest metro in the world, and the most-used transport in the city — warm in winter, and preferred to the buses.
• The fare is around 100 won, which Harry calls next to nothing.
• Soviet in feel: mosaics, murals running the length of the platform, a statue of the leader inside the station, and carriages he is told were built in Germany. The platform newspaper display turns out to carry international news — Japan, Russia, Iran.
• The mingling is staged, and he catches it. He tells the camera with relief that these are real people rather than paid actors; then, told to mingle and finding that nobody will turn round, he watches the guides walk people over to be talked to, and names it on camera without pressing further. See expect a script on camera.
• The exception, and he says so: a 19-year-old who talks to him unprompted, which he calls his best interaction of the day.
• Someone is watching the group throughout, which he points out to the camera.

The guided city

• The tower — 170 m, described as the most iconic thing in Pyongyang, with the state ideology inscribed on the front in gold. The ideology is built on self-reliance, and Harry puts the question on camera and refuses to answer it: are they self-reliant? He doesn’t know, and says so.
• The national library. The building where he finds the only working network of the trip — a closed national intranet, browsed in an old copy of Internet Explorer, with an email from the leader sitting in the inbox. He asks the staff about their favourite books; the on-camera answer is the patriotic one, which is itself the point.
• A department store, for a North Korean sports tracksuit at $80. Payment in dollars or RMB, money and receipt first, goods collected after.
• A taekwondo exhibition — the sport is mandatory in school and graded across nine levels — impressive enough that he expects an injury.
• Cold noodles, the country’s best-known dish, with fried meat and an egg, eaten in a restaurant where a birthday party and a live performance are going on around him.
• A barber’s shop inside the hotel, with a wall of roughly fifteen approved cuts. He asks for the leader’s haircut, at $8, and it turns into a full head shave followed by a head, ear and face massage — the most unusual he says he has ever had, and he has had a few.
• State greenhouses, an hour’s drive out, covered on the North Korea page.

The marathon

The Pyongyang Marathon is the reason the day is worth a page.

• A full stadium — his figure is 50,000 — for the opening ceremony, and the crowd stay in it for four hours. He can’t finish inside it, because it closes early for the closing ceremony.
• A 4:30 cut-off, strictly enforced, with a do-not-finish for anyone over it. He comes in at 3:40, an hour faster than he expected.
• Elite fields: Korean, Ethiopian and Moroccan professional runners, roughly 10 km ahead of him by halfway.
• No guide and no security. This is the only part of the trip where he is unattended, and by his account the first time in five years visitors have been able to move around the city like this. What he does with the freedom is mostly notice that he has it — he points out that he could run off into the apartment blocks or talk to anyone, and nobody would know.
• The route: past skyscrapers he compares to Dubai, through the main square where the military parades are held, and then out of the city entirely into countryside — a river, a football stadium, bicycles everywhere and no cars.
• Crowds line the whole course, smiling and waving, with a lot of grandmothers — distracting enough, he says, that he forgot about the 30 km left.
• Plain-clothes security are on the course too, identifiable by much better suits, blocking particular roads.

Harry’s tips

• Enter the race if there is one. In a country where every hour is chaperoned, the marathon is the one legitimate route to being alone in the streets. Nothing else on the trip comes close for access.
• Take nothing at the water stations if you don’t need it. His own rule, and he admits runners will shout at the screen for it: stopping to urinate costs more time than the water saves.
• Don’t tell yourself what the place is before you’ve been inside. He states the objection to the greenhouse visit out loud, then goes in with an open mind anyway, which is the honest version of judging a place for yourself.

Source

• First Tourist in North Korea’s Capital After 5 Years 🇰🇵 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUmEcL3Feo0
• I Ignored Western Media and Went to North Korea 🇰🇵 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJBeJGf6syc