Although this was the first time I had set foot in the country, my first real feeling of being in North Korea had been 24 hours earlier at the DPRK embassy in Beijing. I was visiting the country to teach body language skills at a business workshop for enterprising North Korean women, organised through a Singapore-based NGO called Choson Exchange, and so our first step was to pick up our education entry visas in China. With visa arrangements organised weeks in advance and the North Korean embassy hardly overloaded with visitors, this should have been a formality. Instead, we were met with blank faces and shrugs- at some point in the North Korean bureaucracy a link in the chain had failed, with the approval apparently somewhere in the Singaporean embassy. Our visas were not there. A few anxious hours of phone calls ensued and eventually with less than an hour before the embassy closed, our approvals were located.

One last night’s sleep in China before heading to Korea. Happy that the other group members seemed young and open minded, I felt safe to go and excited about a whole new experience. Many friends had warned me against going to North Korea, with views ranging from expressions of mild concern to outright opposition, but for me this was not a political trip but an opportunity to learn more about the people of this country- their lives, their traditions and their cultures. I had deliberately tried to avoid reading the news or books about North Korea so as to make myself a blank canvas with an open mind, ready to observe and soak up the experience without preconceptions or prejudice; insofar as possible to see it as it was, not through a filter.