Infiltrating North Korea Part 17: Video Tour of Pyongyang Highlights

by Neil Woodburn on

I was a bit concerned bringing my camcorder into North Korea because I had read that zoom lenses 10X and higher were prohibited in the country. No one checked my camera on the way in, however, and I was therefore able to use my zoom throughout North Korea.

I had specifically purchased the camcorder to film the Mass Games, but ended up spending much of the trip filming simple panorama shots of downtown Pyongyang and some of the tourist sites we visited. This would have been horribly boring in most any other city, but Pyongyang is so very unique and such a rare sight, that my urban footage was some of my most interesting–at least, in my opinion.

And so today, we wind down the series (just two more posts!) with a short video collage of some of the more memorable landmarks we encountered during our stay in the North Korean capital.
The video starts with some karaoke we enjoyed one night after dinner. We then move on to a 360 degree shot of downtown Pyongyang that highlights the Arc of Triumph, the Ryugyong Hotel, the Kim Il Sung Stadium and a massive mosaic picturing Kim Il Sung addressing the masses.

We get a much closer view of the Ryugyong Hotel in the next clip which also features the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium, the city’s cylindrical ice rink, and a very long line for the bus.

And then it’s below ground to check out the extravagant, art-filled metro and wonder if the commuters are actual commuters, or simply actors pretending that the subway works.

We wrap up the video with the grandiose entranceway to the People’s Study Hall in Pyongyang that’s dominated by a massive statue of Kim Il Sung–and yes, our guides bowed deeply to the marble edifice upon entering the room. The shot immediately following is of the main lobby just up a nearby escalator where Kim Jong Il makes a smiling, Cheshire-cat appearance in an oil painting hanging on the wall. And then, finally, we fade out with the classic photos found at the front of every classroom in the Study Hall.

And that’s it. Although my cinematography skills leave a lot to be desired (it’s a new camera, folks!) I do hope that this short video has painted a much clearer picture of the world’s most mysterious and reclusive capital.

Yesterday: A Sunday Drive through Pyongyang
Tomorrow: A Tale of Two Cities

Infiltrating North Korea Part 16: A Sunday Drive through Pyongyang

by Neil Woodburn on

Infiltrating North Korea is a 19-part series exploring the world’s most reclusive nation and its bizarre, anachronistic way of life. To start reading at the beginning of the series, be sure to click here.

Travel within North Korea is tightly regulated; tourists pile into minivans and are carted from landmark to landmark without any opportunity to wander about on their own. This was the most frustrating aspect of my time in North Korea. I simply wanted to stop the minivan so I could get out and walk the streets, mingle with the pedestrians, poke my head into local shops, and wander off the beaten path to see for myself what our guides were keeping hidden from us.

Instead, I spent most of my time like a dog on a car ride, sticking my head out the window, tongue flapping in the wind as Pyongyang rushed by.

Such a method of travel, however, can still reveal quite a bit about North Korea’s mysterious capital; I could catch glimpses through the windows of poorly stocked stores, witness locals scrounging for seeds in the grass of city parks, and spy dilapidated buildings in the distance slowly falling apart. My state sponsored guided tour was intended to portray the city in a perfect light but unless they tinted the windows of our minivan, the real Pyongyang was going to shine through on occasions.

The video above is a six-minute, narrated car ride through the center of Pyongyang. I began filming shortly after entering the city limits–photography is forbidden outside of Pyongyang–and continued sticking my camera out the window until we arrived at the Grand People’s Study House in the center of town. Along the way, we pass a number of landmarks mentioned earlier in these posts, thus providing the opportunity to see how these places are stitched into a larger Pyongyang.

The video should also provide a sense of Pyongyang and its scattered pedestrians, dearth of automobiles, bland storefronts, monumental architecture, ubiquitous propaganda, and immaculately dressed citizenry. Until the time comes when foreigners are allowed to wander the city on their own, 40 mile-per-hour glances such as this one will continue to be the only window we have into this reclusive society.

Yesterday: More Song, Dance, and a little conundrum about chocolate
Tomorrow: Video Tour of Pyongyang Highlights

Infiltrating North Korea Part 15: More song and dance, and a conundrum about chocolate

by Neil Woodburn on

Since posting last week about the North Korean talent show I attended at the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace in Pyongyang, I’ve received a number of requests asking for more video of these outstanding child performers.

And so today, we present a short compilation of some of the best performances from the show.

The above video was shot in the palace’s main theater after we toured classroom after classroom of students learning guitar, violin, piano, table tennis, tae kwon do, and a slew of other cultural pursuits; the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace in Pyongyang was a regular factory of the fine arts.

The culmination of the tour was the palace’s 2,000-seat theater where star pupils put on an amazing show for myself and a small cluster of fellow tourists. The rest of the theater was filled with a much larger group of young students dressed up in their Sunday best and giddy with excitement over the foreign guests within their midst. Of course, none of the students sat next to us, but they were just a few rows away, separated by an aisle and a watchful group of minders and teachers.It was shortly after the show ended that I experienced a rather odd moment.

I had brought with me a Toblerone chocolate bar from home that I wanted to pass on to one of the students. Naturally, we weren’t allowed to do such a thing and so I looked for an opportunity to slip one of them the candy bar when the eagle-eyed minders weren’t looking my way. And that’s when I started to worry.

If any of the adults saw the exchange, the kid I gave it to would get in trouble for accepting something from a foreigner. If any of the other kids saw the exchange, they would get in trouble for not reporting it. That’s the way the system worked. During Stalinist times in the Soviet Union, for example, anyone who witnessed or overheard something even slightly prohibited and failed to report it, were just as guilty. People were actually sent to the Gulag for not reporting on their friends, neighbors and family even though they had done nothing wrong themselves.

I imagine that North Korea isn’t all that different. Sure, no one was going to a labor camp for my Toblerone bar, but there most certainly would have been some type of ramification if anything had occurred other than the student immediately running to the nearest teacher to hand over the contraband. But let’s face it, most any kid on this planet is going to take the risk of keeping the candy bar despite the near certainty of getting caught. And then everybody gets in trouble.

So what’s the harm in a single bar of chocolate, you ask?

Plenty.

A political system whose whole existence is dependent upon keeping the populace ignorant by believing that the outside world is a far worse place, would have problems explaining how a simple bar of chocolate could be so incomprehensibly better than anything domestically produced. And believe me, it was. I had one piece of North Korean chocolate and nearly gagged.

A single, tiny triangle of Toblerone could be all the catalyst needed to make one start questioning the whole system; “If they lied about the quality of foreign products, what else have they lied to us about?”

Revolutions often begin with dissatisfied stomachs and although I had the power to possible start one within the easily won-over taste buds of a music student at the Children’s Palace, I chickened out and eventually ended up leaving the chocolate on the pillow in my hotel room where some adult housekeeper better equipped at possibly outsmarting the system might have figured out a way to enjoy the chocolate without getting caught.

But, I digress. Be sure to click on the video above to watch the wonderful musical talents of North Korean students who have never tasted the joy of a Toblerone bar.

Yesterday: Pyongyang Sock Hop
Tomorrow: A Sunday Drive through Pyongyang

Infiltrating North Korea Part 14: Pyongyang Sock Hop

by Neil Woodburn on

Infiltrating North Korea is a two-week series exploring the world’s most reclusive nation and its bizarre, anachronistic way of life. To start reading at the beginning of the series, be sure to click here.

Yesterday’s video captured the playful, innocent spirit of North Korean kids as they flew kites and ran amuck through Kim Il Sung Square in celebration of the Korean Workers’ Party Foundation Day.

Today, we take you to another celebration for the same holiday. This one, however, fast forwards to the slightly older age of high school students and their version of a celebratory get-together that is far more organized in scope and thus, far more indicative of the tightly structured North Korean lifestyle we had witnessed throughout our stay in the capital.

Although just a few years older than the kids we saw kite flying in the same square, playtime seems to have evolved at the high school level to a choreographed effort where everyone had a role in a much larger production.

Sure, perhaps I’m projecting too much of the North Korean regime onto a simple outdoor dance festival, but it’s difficult to imagine otherwise; the state simply controls and regulates every aspect of life, even down to the moves at a high school dance.

Totalitarian sock hop or otherwise, the production was nonetheless a joy to watch from high atop the Grand Study House where we had just wrapped up a tour. The dance wasn’t on the itinerary but we were able stop for a few moments and take it all in.

The video also includes close-ups of a large Kim Il Sung mosaic, the Yanggakdo Hotel where we stayed, as well as the 170-meter Tower of the Juche Idea that was constructed with 25,550 stones, each representing a day in the life of Kim Il Sung up to the age of 70 when the tower was unveiled on his birthday.

Yesterday: Kids will be Kids
Tomorrow: More Song, Dance, and a Little Conundrum about Chocolate

Infiltrating North Korea Part 13: Kids will be kids

by Neil Woodburn on

After enduring five days of stoic faced North Koreans held hostage in their Mao suits, it was comforting to discover that children are the same everywhere regardless of political indoctrination.

We’d certainly seen plenty of children during our tour of North Korea and nearly all of them were extraordinarily well behaved-much like their parents. But on our final day in Pyongyang as we were heading to the airport, we stopped for a few minutes at Kim Il Sung Square. It was the morning of October 10, and the city was gearing up for the Korean Workers’ Party Foundation Day–a national holiday celebrating the creation of the communist party.

It was rumored that a massive military parade was scheduled for later in the afternoon–long after the tourists had left. But in the morning, the square was reserved for thousands of unsupervised kids flying kites and playing games.
It was extraordinarily refreshing to see them running around and having fun. North Korea had seemed so sad and humorless during our stay and it left me feeling so very depressed. But here, right in front of our eyes, was a mass of childhood innocence not yet tarnished by the state. Sure, you’ll notice that many of the children are wearing communist red scarves and even Kim Il Sung pins on their shirts, but the weight of such a horrific dictatorship has not yet settled on their shoulders, thus freeing them from the shackles of socialist adulthood and allowing them to be just like any other happy-go-lucky child living on planet earth.

Yesterday: A North Korean History Lesson about the U.S.S. Pueblo
Tomorrow: Pyongyang Sock Hop