I haven’t posted here in a long time, in particular since posting all my videos from visiting North Korea my second time. This visit was incredible — including interacting with North Korean soldiers, passing through slum-like neighborhoods normally off-limits to foreigners, visiting factories also normally off-limits…

But also seeing some of the people we saw on the first trip and making connections — regular person-to-person connections — seeing many children, being invited to participate in weddings, and also just enjoying ourselves seeing a different country and culture.

If you know of ways to improve the situation in North Korea, I hope you do. In the meantime, I believe person-to-person human interactions where North Korean people see non-North-Koreans and vice versa improves the situation more than doing so supports the status quo. Most places that become overrun with tourists become like other places in the world.

I posted many posts with videos of this trip and created one set of links to them all. Here it is.

Please feel free to contact me. I’d love to hear your thoughts and answer questions about visiting North Korea.

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Any trip to North Korea will be eye-opening and amazing, even before Dennis Rodman visited. I visited last April for the celebration of the anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth.

I believe visiting creates more understanding and communication than potential problems. As I’ve explained before here and in my book, I consider such interactions among the best ways to increase communication and understanding with North Koreans, which I consider the best ways to bring about more peaceful relations. I believe all related governments have motivations to maintain adversarial relations, so I don’t have much faith in them to create peace.

As I say in one of the videos in this series, I believe regular people like you and I will have to lead our would-be political leaders in this issue.

I wrote up my amazing videos of discovery, communication, education, and regular people like you and me that grew up in North Korea. Here they are, starting with some of the most amazing ones.

Links to the videos

• High-fiving North Koreans in Kim Il Sung Square (part 1, part2)
• Incredible North Korean kids — You won’t believe what you see
  • At a camp, playing Frisbee and taking pictures with us
  • At a country schoolhouse
  • A boy shooting a toy rifle with his mother
• First westerners to visit a mammoth North Korean steel factory, with its smoking, sparking furnace
• Our category_ide singing beautifully — very touching and emotional
• Interview with American tourists
  • On seeing North Koreans watching their dear leader speak for the first time
  • On the differences between expectations and experiences of North Korea everyone sees when they visit
  • More on those differences at the North Korean War Museum
  • Joseph of the An American in North Korea blog (sorry, bad sound)
• North Korea’s incredibly talented youth, with comparable videos of Americans
• Dozens of North Korean couples’ wedding celebrations in a park inviting us to join their celebrations
• Teaching our category_ide colloquial English
• Video essays
  • Surrounded by North Korean soldiers at their Martyr’s Cemetery on Kim Il Sung’s birthday (part 1, part 2)
  • On the unexpected beauty of the North Korean land
  • Surrounded by North Korean soldiers and flowers
• Mammoth 20-meter statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il
• High-fiving and shaking hands with regular Pyongyang people after a giant parade
• Cute North Korean girls at a Pyongyang amusement park taking pictures with us
• The world’s most decrepit highway — see North Korea’s infrastructure
• Another factory rarely seen by foreigners — a North Korean glass factory
• Fun with their odd museums — some fly-through videos of their models and a typically amazing diorama at their subway museum
• The biggest fireworks display I’ve ever seen, celebrating Kim Il Sung’s birthday
• In North Korea’s first ever Ultimate Frisbee tournament, Joshua Spodek gets the defense and catches the game-winning goal (from my 2011 trip)
• Us having fun at a North Korean movie set

Background on North Korea

In case you’re reading this page for the first time, don’t forget to read my old posts on North Korea for background

• Common questions about visiting North Korea
• The Ethics of Visiting North Korea
• What’s touring North Korea like?
• North Korea strategy
• My first post on North Korea
• Basic observations of North Korea
• North Korea themes
• Expectations of North Korea
• Ultimate Frisbee in North Korea
• Audio interview on why I want to North Korea