--- type: Video title: "I Ignored Western Media and Went to North Korea 🇰🇵" description: Day two in Pyongyang — a tracksuit bought back-to-front, the national library's intranet, a Kim Jong-un haircut, state vertical farms, and a marathon that buys him the only unescorted hours of the trip. tags: [north-korea, pyongyang, marathon, propaganda, farming, haircut, guided-tour, authoritarian-states] timestamp: 2026-08-05T13:00:00Z resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJBeJGf6syc video_id: GJBeJGf6syc upload_date: 2025-04-13 duration: 1692 --- # I Ignored Western Media and Went to North Korea 🇰🇵 The second day of a guided trip to [North Korea](/countries/north-korea.md), almost all of it in [Pyongyang](/places/pyongyang.md): the tower, the national library, a taekwondo exhibition, cold noodles, an hour's drive out to the state greenhouse complex, and a barber's shop in the hotel. It ends with the **Pyongyang Marathon**, which is the reason the day matters. The race is the one part of the trip with no guide and no minder — he runs 42 km through the capital and out into the countryside completely unattended, which he says visitors have not been able to do for five years. He finishes in 3:40 against a 4:30 cut-off, and closes on the line he uses more than any other: there is a difference between a government and its people. *Obs: this is day two. The first day is a separate video that has no captions and has not been ingested — see the note on the [North Korea](/countries/north-korea.md) page.* *Obs: the video carries affiliate links for an eSIM and a travel debit card in the description. Neither is read on camera and neither provider is recorded here.* *Obs: several proper nouns are garbled in the subtitles — the tower, the main square and the cold-noodle dish are all rendered phonetically. They are written out in full on the pages, but the underlying spelling comes from the video's own chapter list and context, not from a clean transcript.* ## Key moments - [00:05] The premise: back in Pyongyang, and this time leaving the city to see what life is like outside the capital. - [00:36] The hotel is on the outskirts, in the industrial belt, with a balcony view over the factories and the city. - [01:07] **The tower** — 170 m, the most iconic thing in Pyongyang, with the state ideology inscribed on the front. The ideology is **self-reliance**, and Harry asks the obvious question on camera and declines to answer it: *are they self-reliant? I don't know, maybe we can't answer that right now.* - [02:18] **A North Korean tracksuit, $80**, from a department store. - [02:54] **You pay in US dollars or Chinese RMB**, and **you pay before you get the goods** — money first, then a receipt, then collect the items. - [03:09] The national library, and the intranet: no Wi-Fi and no data anywhere else, but here there is a closed network, complete with an email from the leader in the inbox. - [04:47] **The observation that runs through the whole day**: off camera people are open and say what they actually think and what films they like; the moment a camera appears they switch into a scripted register. - [05:26] **A taekwondo exhibition.** It's mandatory in school, one of the country's biggest sports, and graded across nine levels. - [06:47] **Cold noodles**, the country's most famous dish, served with fried meat and an egg — and a birthday party performance going on at the next table. - [08:18] An hour's drive out of the city past villages and farmland to the **state greenhouse complex.** - [08:51] He calls the criticism before the comments section does — *they're only showing you this to prove a point* — and goes in anyway with an open mind. - [08:51] **Vertical farming**, which he has never seen before, in a huge multi-greenhouse complex with supplementary lighting for the upper racks. - [09:23] The claim as it was given to him: **three state-owned complexes feed the whole country**, and this one was built on a former airfield. - [09:58] **25 million people**, fed largely on domestic farming (from video – unverified — this is what he is told on site, and he says so). - [10:30] His actual takeaway, which is about home: everything in the UK is imported and that gets taken for granted. - [11:03] **Propaganda everywhere** — slogans on walls all the way round, which he can't read and has translated. - [11:32] **A haircut in the hotel barber's**, from a wall of about fifteen approved styles that all look much the same to him. He asks for the leader's cut. - [14:31] **$8**, asked about only after the fact. - [15:02] It escalates without warning into a **full head shave**, then an extended head, ear and face massage — ear-wax removal included. - [17:23] He isn't sure tipping is allowed and tips anyway. - [17:51] **The marathon.** A full stadium — he says 50,000 — for an opening ceremony; the crowd stay for four hours. He won't finish inside it because it closes early for the ceremony. - [18:25] **No guide, no security, unattended** — the first time on the trip, and something he says visitors haven't been able to do for five years. - [19:05] Elite Korean, Ethiopian and Moroccan runners at the front; he isn't trying to keep up. - [20:53] What the freedom actually means to him: he could run off into the apartment blocks, could talk to anyone, and nobody is watching. - [21:32] The route goes past skyscrapers he compares to Dubai, and through the main square where the military parades are held. - [22:03] The crowd — constant smiling and waving, and a lot of grandmothers — is distracting enough to make him forget the 30 km left. - [22:39] **Plain-clothes security**, identifiable by better suits, blocking off certain roads. - [23:15] Out of Pyongyang entirely and into open countryside: a river, a football stadium, **bicycles everywhere and no cars.** - [23:50] He refuses water for the whole race, on the grounds that stopping to urinate would cost him more time. - [24:26] Past 25 km is unknown territory; he gets through it on downloaded motivational audio. - [26:59] **Finished in 3:40**, an hour faster than he expected, and barely able to walk. - [27:30] The closing verdict: the trip changed how he sees the country, the people were warm and welcoming, and **that** is what shapes how he feels about a place — *there's a big difference between a government and its people.* ## Extracted pages - Country: [North Korea](/countries/north-korea.md) - Place: [Pyongyang](/places/pyongyang.md) - Tips: [A government and its people are not the same thing](/tips/separate-a-government-from-its-people.md), [Do hard things on purpose](/tips/do-hard-things-on-purpose.md)