The press bus took a wrong turn - and suddenly, everything changed in the official showcase of North Korean achievement.

A cloud of dust swirled down deeply potholed streets, past concrete apartment buildings crumbling at the edges. Elderly people trudged along the pavement, some with handmade backpacks crafted from canvas bags. Two men in wheelchairs waited at a bus stop. There were shops with no lights, and unsurfaced sidestreets.

Ordinary North Koreans stared unabashedly at the 50 or so foreign reporters on a rare trip to this secretive, autocratic nation as it honoured its founder, heralded its new leader and prepared for Friday's satellite launch - an apparent failure that Washington said was really a test of missile technology.

A North Korean woman carries her baby on her back in Pyongyang. Photograph: David Guttenfelder/AP

"Perhaps this is an incorrect road?" mumbled one of the North Korean minders, well-dressed government officials who restrict reporters to meticulously staged presentations that inevitably centre on praise for the three generations of the Kim family, which has ruled the country since 1948.

So as the camera shutters clicked, the drivers of the three buses quickly reversed up the the narrow streets and headed toward the intended destination: a spotlessly clean, brightly lit, extensively marbled and nearly empty building that makes digital music recordings and DVDs.

It was at the Hana Music Information Centre, a guide told the reporters, that North Korea's longtime leader, Kim Jong-il, made one of his last public appearances before his death in December.

"I hope that the journalists present here report only the absolute truth," said Ri Jinju, her voice trembling, her hair rigid with hairspray. "The truth about how much our people miss our comrade Kim Jong-il, and how strong the unity is between the people and leadership, who are vigorously carrying out the leaders' instructions to build a great, prosperous and powerful nation."

In North Korea, it's hard to know what's real, and you certainly can't go looking for it.

Anyone who leaves the press tour, or who walks from the few hotels where foreigners are allowed, can be detained by the police and threatened with expulsion.

But even in such a controlled environment, reality asserts itself.

North Korean men watch a plane pass overhead in Pyongyang. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP

Is reality the cluster of tall buildings within view of the main foreigners' hotel, where long strings of bright, coloured lights are switched on when the sun sets, illuminating entire blocks? Or is it the vast stretches of Pyongyang, by far the most developed city in the impoverished country, that are left pitch dark at night?

Is reality to be found along Pyongyang's drab but spotless main roads, the only streets that journalists normally see, with their revolutionary posters urging North Koreans to struggle toward a Stalinist paradise? Or is it on the streets near the music centre?

"They've left very few stones unturned in North Korea," said Anthony Brunello, a professor at Eckerd College in Florida, who has studied totalitarian propaganda methods. He said officials will go to nearly any length to create a system that will keep the Kim family in power.

If that means using propaganda that seems incongruous to outsiders, few of whom believe the official version of Pyongyang as communist idyll, it is very logical in Pyongyang. After all, the Kims still hold power.

"They've managed to create a process of control that works," Brunello said.

Most foreign visitors to Pyongyang never encounter a pothole, a traffic jam or a piece of litter larger than a cigarette butt. They see no people with physical disabilities, and no graffiti.

They normally see only the showcase buildings - the Victorious Fatherland Liberation war museum, the palace commemorating the Kims' juche philosophy of self-reliance, the computer labs at Kim Il-sung University, filled with people that the minders insist are everyday North Koreans.

The students in the classrooms don't glance up as dozens of reporters intrude, and their lecture continues without pause. The young people in the university pool career down the plastic slide, in front of TV cameras, as if they are completely alone.

Perhaps they are real students. But look into their eyes, and their pupils dance around you like you're not there, as if they've been trained to pretend you are not.

Only the official guides, always beautiful women in flowing polyester gowns in ice-cream colours, will talk readily. And any discussion always centre around the Kims: the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, the Great General Kim Jong-il and now - since his father's death - the Respected General Kim Jong-un.

They speak in relentless hyperbole. "The more time passes, the more we miss our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il," said Ri, the music centre guide. "I don't think we can ever find any person so great."

Behind the facade, though, North Koreans want the same things as just about everyone else - or at least that's what defector after defector has said.

They argue with their partners and worry when their children get ill. They wage office politics, dream of buying cars and, if they have enough clout, they hope to get away to the beach in the summer. When times are at their worst, as they were during the famine of the 1990s, they dream simply of having enough food to feed their families.

A residential compound in Pyongyang, North Korea. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP

It is not clear why the regime hides places like the dusty, potholed neighbourhood, which is just a mile or so from the centre of town. It doesn't look like a war zone, or even like a rough New York neighbourhood. Many streets in New Delhi, the capital of one of the world's fastest-growing economies, look far more battered and poor.

To most North Koreans, a quarter of whom depend on international food aid, living in homes without electricity or running water, the neighbourhood would look upper-middle class. Special permits are required to live in the capital, and life here is vastly better than it is for most people in the countryside.

There are secure government jobs, electricity for at least a few hours a day, better-stocked shops and schools that have indoor toilets.

The officials, however, still hide the neighborhoods. There's a certain view of North Korea they want visitors to have.

Maybe the regime is opening up. In past years, media minders would order reporters to put down their cameras if they saw something they felt didn't reflect well. At times, they would close the curtains on the buses.

But on Thursday, the minders said nothing as the cameras clicked away. The journalists stared. And outside the bus, the North Koreans who never expected to be seen stared back.