One of the things that you know before you go there
is that there it is a country with a personality cult
there's pictures of grandfather, father and son,
so that's Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, the current leader.
Absolutely everywhere.
By the end of the week I started to find it quite creepy
these sort of permanent smiles that you couldn't challenge or question.
Even just spending seven days inside a personality cult is quite overwhelming,
quite disturbing ...
You have to accept reporting conditions there that you would probably wouldn't accept anywhere else.
You're constantly accompanied by minders,
although they don't like being called minders.
In our case, two very nice guys
called Mister Kim and Mister Lee.
We were never officially told we couldn't go anywhere without them
but it was made pretty clear that we were not to leave the hotel.
And they organised a very packed schedule from early in the morning until late at night.
We went to a water park, to a zoo, to a funfair,
to a stamp museum ...
And it was sort of interesting because
it felt very much like they were trying to show us
a very specific image of ordinary life in Pyongyang.
I think if you look at lot of reporting from North Korea is often focused
on sort of regimented mass events
and we'd actually asked to see some of that because that's obviously a big part of life
in North Korea.
People have to do a lot of stuff kind of in unison.
But none of those requests were actually met.
So we only saw the capital, which everybody who studies North Korea
says it is a different world from the rest of North Korea.
It's a city of this quite almost surreal apartment blocks
and they really seemed to love pastel colours.
And it's all arranged so that real life happens around the back.
So it's almost like the main streets are show fronts.
The Bag factory was next to the back of one of these apartment blocks.
When we were going back to the bus I just sort of wondered off to have a look.
There were some people taking coal deliveries,
there were some people with armbands sitting outside
a little sign maybe for a shop, selling things.
My first indication, that this was maybe a little bit sensitive,
was two women started to get quite cross with me.
And then the guides, who'd been somewhere else,
came sort of running over and said:
'No, no, you can't take pictures here, you've got to get back on the bus.'
And I realised later, it's part of this sort of
desire to show this very manicured, manufactured
perfected image of North Korean society
and also maybe they don't want you to sort of
understand some of the details of control.
And later found out that North Korea apparently has residents' committees,
usually older women, to check that their dress fits what North Korea's
sort of unofficial standards consider acceptable.
We were there for the anniversary of Kim Il-sung's birthday which is known as the day of the sun,
and is something like a sort of North Korean Christmas really.
North Koreans strenuously deny that it's a religion
but it has pretty much all the trappings of a religion
including even a kind of nativity myth.
There's a village just on the outskirts of Pyongyang which is meant to be where
Kim Il-sung was born.
People go there to pay homage, to leave flowers,
they go to the well and drink some of the revolutionary water to make themselves
revolutionary and put some of it into bottles and take it away.
And then this little sort of farmers cove, you see it reproduced all over the country
in paintings, in posters ...
While we were there it was the centrepiece
and the theme of the Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia flower festival
that happens every year in Pyongyang.
North Koreans take these flowers really seriously.
You can buy books of how to sort of identify
a perfect Kimilsungia, a perfect Kimjongilia in bloom ...
And families are there and everybody's sort of enjoying looking at the flowers
taking pictures of each other, taking pictures of their family.
Mr Kim and Mr Lee, they wouldn't always translate things
so it soon became evident after, I think just a day or two
that nobody in Pyongyang knew that Kim was planning to meet with Trump.
And whenever we tried to ask questions about that,
they would refuse to translate it
or they would say this is not a time for asking political questions.
They would never outright say, 'nobody knows about this'
or 'you're not allowed to do it.'
They would just be incredibly evasive.
Here's this summit that's billed as sort of crucial for world peace
and you know, a big step that Kim is sort of talking up internationally,
but domestically, his own people have no idea that it's gonna happen.
You know, it gives you a sense of how incredibly shut off
from the rest of the world people are there.
We were taken to a lot of sort of places where people were having fun.
And obviously at the back of your mind there's always a question.
Is all of this put on, is all of this a show for me?
I feel like you do get a sense of life in Pyongyang.
I think that I had to keep reminding myself that this is a tiny portion of the country,
this was the elite of the elite, the people that are lucky enough to live in Pyongyang.
Probably 10% of North Korean experts estimate that have sort of a relatively
comfortable life.
But at the same time, it was interesting and important to see
this other side of life.
Because it's very, very, very hard to leave North Korea.
And if you do leave, your family are often punished for it.
So there is a lot of people in North Korea who perhaps don't want to be there
or might want to go somewhere else but don't really feel they have any choice.
I think the thing we can't forget when we are thinking about difficult places
whether that's a sort of extreme dictatorship like North Korea or a war zone like Syria,
is people do try to sort of squeeze what enjoyment they can from life
if there's any chance of that.
There's a lot of ordinary people who are just trying to get on with their lives,
get their children to school ...
And they're not willing to take the risk of being captured,
sent to a labour camp, perhaps executed.
Or they don't want to leave all their family behind,
their cousins, their parents, their siblings ...
So many phones in Pyongyang.
Everywhere we went, people were taking selfies, snapping away ...
I mean in that sense you sort of could have been anywhere ...
The amount of phones and sort of enthusiasm for using them.
North Korea is sealed but it's not as sealed as it used to be.
You know, information does come in, there's a lot of evidence that a lot of North Koreans
are watching South Korean soap operas.
The penalty for doing that is incredibly high, you are risking arrest, being sent to a labour camp
even execution, but people do it anyway.
Some of the experts I spoke to after I left, I thought had a interesting perspective
which was that Kim knew that awareness of this world was reaching into North Korea.
That there was some understanding, even if it was very limited of what people could
access in the outside world.
That they had internet, that they could look all the things online.
So, he was sort of creating a North Korean version of that society,
co-opting the elite, or limiting their discontent because what they have might not be as good
as what you have outside North Korea
but they can look at that and think that actually: 'I have a smartphone,
I can take pictures'.
I mean that speaks I think to something we saw
everywhere we went in Pyongyang,
which is that Kim Jong-un is trying to create for a tiny elite,
but for an elite who are essential to his continuation in power,
a sort of simulacrum of a western consumer society.
We went to a shoe factory where there was a sort of display shelf
of what looked like western shoes ...
And so, we asked about it: 'What are these shoes doing here?'
And they said: 'They were given to us by the dear leader,
Kim Jong-un, to inspire us to make better shoes.'
You think North Korea really is facing off with the west
as you know, sort of attacking America, condemning America, criticising America,
not trying to copy American trainers.
Unusual sole for a sports' shoe.
I mean, one of the big questions people always ask is:
'Should you even go to North Korea? Is there any point given it is so stage managed
that you'll be sort of constantly watched?'
So you are constantly second guessing how much of this is real,
how much of this has been set up for me to see,
to sort of trick me essentially.
But at the same time, as a journalist, I do actually feel there is a purpose
and a sense in going to places like this even if all you're seeing is what they want
to present you with.
Their choice of what to show you, the questions even that you aren't allowed
to ask can be so revealing.
Occasionally, you would sort of go through a back street
and catch a glimpse of another world,
you know, a sort of homemade tractor cobbled together from parts or things like that.
But mostly we were being shown this very glitzy front of a country
where there are still people going hungry
and where there's absolutely appalling human rights abuses ...
One of the worst networks of sort of concentration
and labour camps that exist anywhere in the world.
One of the cruelest, harshest regimes,
one of the strictest political punishment systems ...
So, it was trying to balance the chance to get at least a glimpse of North Korea,
to have some sense of life there,
of how Kim Jong-un is trying to change North Korea
while maintaining himself in power
without as a journalist forgetting the fact this was a very manufactured fun.
So we were constantly trying to sort of balance those two things.