I Ignored Western Media and Went to North Korea 🇰🇵

The second day of a guided trip to North Korea, almost all of it in Pyongyang: 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 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
• Place: Pyongyang
• Tips: A government and its people are not the same thing, Do hard things on purpose