Our Last Full Day In The DPRK

A bright dawn. The weather looks set fair for our last full day in the DPRK. The phone rings as I’m dressing. It’s So Hyang. For a moment I think she might be calling to say that the time difference has been restored again, but her message this time is rather more mysterious. The hotel lobby will be out of bounds for arriving or departing guests for the next half-hour. No reason given. I slip down to breakfast. Nothing seems to be happening and I return to my room thirty minutes later to get myself ready for our last day’s filming.

When I emerge from the lift this time I find myself in the midst of a crowd of people, some of them Koreans, but the rest an altogether taller, bulkier race, with American accents and Bluetooth earphones. A blonde woman looks around with a tight, impatient impression and a dark-haired man beside her clutches a thick sheaf of notes. In the middle of the throng is a burly, heavy-framed man who I later learn is Mike Pompeo, the American Secretary of State. He and his team are here to finalise the repatriation of a number of Americans imprisoned by the regime for so-called ‘hostile acts’, which had previously included distributing Bibles and spreading Christianity.

Pompeo’s arrival in North Korea, which would have been totally unthinkable four months ago, shows just how fast Kim Jong Un’s charm offensive is moving. Far from being one of the world’s diplomatic backwaters, the DPRK has been the epicentre of international affairs for these past two weeks. And this is another extraordinary chapter. It’s not every day you see an American Secretary of State in your hotel lobby. Especially a lobby in the axis of evil.

Our last day is a bit of a whirlwind. At a big, well-equipped sports centre I watch a display of taekwondo, the Korean martial art which is practised here with quite stunning strength, agility and concentrated intensity.

Using a combination of high kicks, twists, and hard, harsh shouts, they demonstrate how to disarm any attacker, after which they take it out on bricks and blocks of wood on which a skilful martial artist can administer a force of 200 kilograms. A slim, young, softly spoken girl, who spends sixteen hours a week training, teaches me the basics. Like standing up straight.

As with the table-tennis players I saw at the school, there is in all things they do a fierce determination to be the best.

Faces are tense and tight-lipped. They are doing it for the Kims, who look down on them from the wall.

We take a mid-morning break at somewhere I wish we’d found earlier. Coffee shops are practically non-existent in the North Korean capital, certainly ones smelling of freshly ground beans. Hence our great delight at finding a café, set up by an Austrian coffee roaster, Helmut Sacher, in partnership with Austrian entrepreneur, Helmut Brannen, who specialises in bringing the finest coffee to the least likely places. They have a branch in Ulan Bator.

The atmosphere is Viennese, low-lit, lampshaded and intimate, with real coffee, whipped cream and cake. It’s a small, private space that feels like a welcome contrast to the prevailing gigantism of the city’s public spaces. But by coincidence, the two are side by side, because the café is on the corner of perhaps the most well-known of Pyongyang’s arenas, the colossal Kim Il Sung Square. This is probably the only corner of North Korea that international audiences might be able to identify, for this is where the parades and marches and displays of military might take place, though most of the time it’s used for cultural activities, sports demonstrations and the expertly choreographed mass dances for which the North Koreans are renowned.

Two sides of the square are flanked by grand Stalinist facades but at one end rise the pitched and tiled roofs of an impressive Korean-style building, dating from the 1980s, from whose long balconies salutes are taken in military parades. The building itself has no military purpose. It is in fact the national library, known as the Grand People’s Study House.

I look up at the Study House from the vastness of Kim Il Sung Square, feeling tiny in a space that can easily accommodate over 100,000 participants at a time. On the ground are lines of discreet white dots to show exactly where each member of the display stands, and how much room they’ve got on either side. It’s tight.

Our last lunch is at a hugely popular restaurant serving the national dish, naengmyeon. Tables are at a premium, for it seems that the people of Pyongyang cannot get enough of buckwheat noodles in an iced broth with half a boiled egg perched on top.

Once you’ve got used to the fact that they’re cold, the noodles are tasty. They’re served in great heavy bunches which are not easy to eat politely. My chopsticks have difficulty heaving them off the plate, let alone into my mouth. Consumption is a messy, but ultimately rewarding, process.

It is in this fabled restaurant that our minders ask us for the first time to erase footage that we’ve shot. And it isn’t over any big issue, simply that diners on one table object to being filmed. The rest of the time, although there have been robust arguments about how material might be edited, nothing has met with blanket disapproval. Which is not what any of us had expected.

In the afternoon we film along the extraordinary phenomenon that is Mirae Street, or Future Scientists Street, an avenue of intriguingly designed forty-storey towers that were completed in less than a year. Much of the work was done by soldier-builders, members of North Korea’s vast army, working day and night. They describe such swift construction as building at ‘Chollima speed’, Chollima being a mythical winged horse, co-opted by the regime as a symbol of the speed with which the economy needed to be rebuilt after the war.

The Western view I’ve often heard expressed is that these tower blocks are merely a grand gesture, a visual shell, empty and unfinished inside. I can refute this suspicion and confirm that at least one family has moved in. On the tenth of forty-four floors I’m invited into a spacious apartment, home to a husband and wife, two children and two grandparents. The grandparents are expected to look after preschool children so both parents can go out to work.

I meet the wife, who happens to be at home today and is happy to show me around. She’s in her thirties, I’d imagine, dark hair neatly styled, and considering she can’t have had that many Western film crews in her kitchen, remarkably relaxed. There are a lot of artificial flowers and stuffed toys around and an air-conditioning unit called ‘Enjoy Wind’.

This apartment is in a street for the elite, a concentration of top scientists and university professors, reaping the reward no doubt for creating the nuclear weapons that allow this small country to punch so far above its weight.

It’s early evening as we leave the towers of Mirae Street. At ground level there is a busy public space with a volleyball game in progress and a TV soap playing on an outdoor screen. It’s a drama of everyday life, I’m told. A North Korean EastEnders.

Midnight in Pyongyang, and I’m back in my room on the twenty-fifth floor after a celebratory meal with all our guides and minders. Glasses were raised and toasts drunk in beer and whisky and soju. That Neil was so genuinely cordial in his thanks said everything about the strength of the relationship that has grown up between us all. My feelings were guarded to start with. I equated the unfamiliar with the threatening.

As the days went by, I realised my preconceptions were distorted. The North Koreans I have encountered are not malevolent automatons. They are locked in a system which demands unbending loyalty, but which in return offers security, and within narrow confines the chance for some to enjoy life and to excel. Those we have met, and those we saw going about their daily lives, were not broken and bowed, but proud of their country and pleased that we were so interested in how they lived.

For our part, we worked very hard every day, grasping every opportunity a rare trip like this offered. I think our hosts appreciated that, hard work being very much a Korean trait, north and south of the border.

Friendships grew, as did their curiosity about how we lived. By the end Mrs Kim, Tall Li, Yung Un, all so formidably stern to start with, relaxed and joked and enjoyed being with us, rather than just watching us. I’d shown So Hyang photos of my family in London and she had talked about herself and her parents quite openly.

This morning as I was about to be filmed, I’d asked her to look after my panama hat. I told her that the best way of looking after it was to wear it. Shyly at first she tried it on. After that, she was clearly reluctant to take it off. Out of the corner of my eye I caught her striking a pose, testing the new look in her reflection in the window of the minibus. That was when I knew at least something of me was destined to stay in North Korea.