Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VICE has ever dealt with. After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.” Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” We had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They already knew we were journalists, and over there, if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist, you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea. But we went for it. The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At the airport, the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left, and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed? but this guy with our group, who was from the LA Times, told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited, then you’re not going to get your visa. So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. That was our first hint at just what a freaky, freaky trip we were embarking on.

As one of the world’s last closed societies, North Korea has attracted global curiosity to what is sealed off between it’s borders. Despite an ongoing food crisis that has spanned two decades and the cascading paranoia of the political leadership, life manages to go on in the Hermit Kingdom. Compiled from a handful of sources, we take a fascinating look at everyday life in North Korea: