Glimpse Into Daily Life in North Korea

Glimpse Into Daily Life in North Korea

A little boy skips along grasping a classmate's hand, his cheeks flushed and a badge of the Great Leader's smiling face pinned to his Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt. Men in military green share a joke over beers at a German-style pub next door to the Juche tower. Schoolgirls wearing the red scarves of the Young Pioneers sway in unison as they sing a classic Korean tune I, too, learned as a child.

Everywhere I look, communist North Korea is a world both foreign and familiar to my Korean-American eyes, a place where the men wear Mao suits and children tote Mickey Mouse backpacks, where they call one another "comrade" and love their spicy kimchi.

Since becoming the Seoul bureau chief for The Associated Press in 2008, I have made five eye-opening visits to North Korea. Chief Asia photographer David Guttenfelder has traveled to the country numerous times over the past 12 years.Jean H. Lee, The Associated Press bureau chief in Seoul, and David Guttenfelder, AP's chief Asia photographer, have made numerous reporting trips to North Korea in recent years.Unspoiled and unguarded, Vermont's old-fashioned swimming holes offer beauty _ and some risk. They were granted unprecedented access on their latest journey to Pyongyang and areas outside the nation's showcase capital.

We're among the few Western journalists who've been allowed into North Korea during a period of heightened tensions that began three years ago with the shooting death of a South Korean tourist. A parade of provocations has followed: a long-range rocket launch, a nuclear test, the sinking of a South Korean warship and a deadly artillery attack on a front-line island.