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By Charles Scanlon
BBC News, North Korea
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Women in white created the perfect map of their country
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Every seat is taken on the Air Koryo flight from Beijing, packed with North Korean officials and an idiosyncratic mix of foreigners - the sympathetic, the committed and the curious.
Our mobile phones are impounded at immigration but no-one's complaining - isolation is an important part of the experience.
The government assigned a small posse of minders - interpreters - to me and another British journalist but there has been a bureaucratic hitch.
One does speak English, but a young woman in flowing pink national costume is a Chinese speaker and a third speaks neither but is planning to learn both, starting on our trip.
Cat and mouse
The odds don't look good. It's three against two for the inevitable game of cat and mouse that is a feature of any visit to North Korea.
Their job is to accompany us everywhere and prevent us filming anything that's "unauthorised", which seems to include most of the city.
There's no escaping it. Pyongyang looks spectacular with cherry blossom in full bloom along the wide boulevards and flocks of women in bright primary colours out practising mass dance routines to celebrate the great leader's birthday.
He beams down from massive coloured murals. There's only vague polite interest when we bring up nuclear deadlines and the confrontation with the United States.
Cheap seats
We're here officially for the Arirang Festival, a mass gymnastics display that helps bring in badly-needed foreign currency.
One of our guides swallows and looks away when he tells us it is 200 euros a ticket - in black market rates that's well over a year's salary. We settle for the cheap seats at 50 euros.
The display is spectacular of course - "mass games" are a North Korean speciality. One former gymnast explains it is a way to transcend your individuality and become part of the nation's collective will.
At one point, 1,000 women in white coalesced into a perfect map of the country. No detail is spared. Two women join up to represent an isolated offshore rock that's disputed with Japan.
After the show we escape our minders - score one to us - and meet up with members of the city's small community of foreign aid workers.
One, who's been working in Burma, explains the people there are free by comparison.
Here, everyone needs permission to leave the city, foreigners can't visit people in their homes and relations with locals are tightly restricted - a level of control that none of the workers has ever experienced before.
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