Today was see a few random videos. First some oil tankers in the river by a road in Pyongyang seen from our bus. Sorry not that interesting. Just sharing for completeness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zec1nanZyo Here we see the inside of our bus while we road on an insanely bumpy road. The North Korean government seems to want to portray itself as the best at everything, so putting foreigners and such a poorly kept road suggests others are far worse, if alternative infrastructure exists at all. I can't imagine how they feel about the difference between what they want to portray and what they can't help but show. I did my best to hold the camera steady, but that was impossible on this road. Plus the road was…

As if getting to see an industrial site like the steel factory wasn't enough, we got to tour a glass factory too. Here we see the input, which I think is melting down old glass and other ingredients to make new glass. You can see they color different parts of the machinery different colors. Input: melting glass and ingredients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eYE9s0IMW4 Middle: the machine Here we see the middle part of the factory's production line. I couldn't capture looking inside the contraption to see the glowing molten glass but the camera couldn't capture its brightness. Sorry about the noisiness. That's just the place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcbvgXeRYX4 Output Here we see some output of the contraption -- a line of metal glass. If you look carefully you'll see what…

As I wrote before, North Korea seems to like making models of sites and I like making fly-through videos of models. Here are two more videos of models. I'm not sure of what. Something industrial. Maybe the steel factory? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUsL4cZiRkw Here's the second video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbrP8-9RfH4 Typically when they showed us models like this they described how they represent a time Kim Il Sung visited the place, even if his visiting probably contributed little to the functionality of the place. We came to understand the number of visits by the leader indicated the place's significance.

Part of my series of videos on North Korea from my April 2012 visit, for now unedited and in the order I took the videos. Today's videos are of our visit to a North Korean steel factory. They told us we were among the first foreigners to visit the place in a long time, maybe ever. We loved visiting this place. That we got to tour right into the heart of such an industrial place was incredible. They didn't have us wear hard hats or take any sort of safety training. I joked that if the U.S. government had a problem with us visiting North Korea, at first the State Department would have the problem but after this video it would be OSHA. The driveway…

Part of my series of videos on North Korea from my April 2012 visit, for now unedited and in the order I took the videos. Today's videos happen to cover infrastructure. Pyongyang Roadside This video shows the view out of a tour bus of a typical Pyongyang street. You can see the (in)famous Ryugyong Hotel, a subway stop entrance, and Pyongyang's typically empty roadways. You can hear our guide's voice over the bus's speaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evqCqTFPhuU Potholiest Highway in the World This video shows the view from our bus of the highway with the most potholes I've ever seen. I think they called it the Children's Highway, or something like that. Though about ten lanes wide, vehicles often have no smooth lane to drive on. I…

Non-North Koreans had a field day with the videos of people crying they saw after Kim Jong-Il's death last year. People saw it as over-the-top and probably forced at the pain of punishment. I wrote on that crying before. On this trip, on April 15 -- the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth -- we got to visit the newly unveiled colossal statue of Kim Jong-Il next to his father's colossal statue. The pictures below are just after we -- the whole group, but Jordan, Joseph, and me pictured -- visited the statues behind us up close (no cameras were allowed much closer than we were). You can see behind us hundreds of North Koreans approaching the feet of the statues. In the time…