“Hmmm…”
“It’s…different…”
“I can’t really…”
“Sort of like…”
“I really have no bloody idea.”

I always find it difficult to give an answer whenever someone asks what visiting North Korea was like. The best way to picture it, is to imagine being Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, just as he’s becoming aware that something’s not quite right.

Once you get beyond the initial shock and stop muttering “Holy shit I’m in North Korea,” over and over to yourself, and look beyond the squeaky-clean facades, you start noticing things. With every monument visit, train ride, picnic and school tour, an odd feeling that none of it is what it appears, starts creeping up on you. 

It’s not really something you can put your finger on at first, or openly point at and question in front of the two guides who are watching you at all times. At least, not unless you’re keen on chopping rocks for the next 20 years alongside all the locals who dared to question the great and illustrious and heaven-sent leader’s benevolent plans.

But the more you see, the more places you go, the more you find yourself struggling with the realisation that none of it is really happening. It’s all a show. The put-on of all put-ons, to try and trick tourists into believing that North Korea is a fun and happening place.

Gamers will get it. Walking along the street of an open world video game, with NPC characters appearing to go about their daily business. But when you stop and look a little more closely, you see that they’re really just walking to the corner, pausing, walking back and repeating, or having the same conversations with one another, again and again.

My little group first noticed things weren’t all they seemed, when one North Korean lady who danced with one of us at a “spontaneous and unplanned picnic in the park,” as one of our guides put it, popped up the following day at a circus show. The look of horror on her face as we waved from the bus on its way out of the carpark, was matched in intensity only by the speed at which she turned and disappeared into the large crowd of locals.

As we became increasingly aware that it was all being staged, we experienced more and more strange little moments. A well-rehearsed actor pretended to be a soldier at a shack disguised as a lookout, explained how North Korea was keeping their evil southern counterparts in check at the DMZ. Shoppers in a high-end department store had their luxury bags and cosmetics run through the cash register, only to have them placed not-quite-discreetly-enough behind the counter, and placed shortly thereafter back onto shelves.

The longer the trip went on, the more confused we became about it all. The happy commuters on the East German-built trains. The kids roller skating in wide, eerily-empty city boulevards. The faces staring blankly out of trolley buses. The few local couples who dined (far away from us) in otherwise empty restaurants. Even the massive performance put on by a cast of over 50,000 in front of generals, government officials and gob-smacked tourists in the world’s biggest stadium. Was any of what we were seeing, real?

I came away from North Korea more confused than before I’d entered. I still don’t know what to entirely make of it all. The lengths to which the North Korean government went to fool tourists, is at least on par with Christof’s effort to trick Truman.

I think I’d have to go back and experience it again to have a chance of really wrapping my head around the place. But after having posted this account online, I probably won’t.