The bar on Sungri Street, Pyongyang

They emerge out onto the pavement, leaving behind the deep tunnels of the Pyongyang metro system.

People write such nonsense about that. It is all a show, they say. Designed, staged and choreographed for foreign visitors. Everyday. The wary stares the group received from Pyongyang commuters, creates an air of doubt and insecurity. So much of the visitors’ experience is faked and curated, it is easy to imagine that nothing is real.

Moving with precise, disciplined, spirited movements, all given to please the leader, the blue-uniformed traffic women with the orange hand-baton set the cars and trucks in motion. They are all good-looking, and must retire at 26. Logan’s Run for traffic ladies.

They cross the road. A less than magnificent seven. Three Finns, two Austrians, a Brit and Mr. K, their guide. They head off to Kim Il Sung Square towards a restaurant on the river, the Rainbow Boat. The pace is slow, as Mr. K does his best to herd the scholars. A few are waiting outside a bar.

A bar!

Inside the light is bright and smoky chrome yellow. People sitting, standing. Drinking beer. Muffled, loud conversations can be heard on the street. No wary glances here. People in the bar look self-assured and absorbed in what they are doing. They were having fun. Sungri Street otherwise looked like any other government district. Anonymous and austere concrete, the mirror image of Whitehall or the Palace of Justice. Doors and windows look as if they are never opened. It is dark, offices and streets empty. The bar is the first evidence they have seen of unscripted energy and enterprise. The steamy warmth of the bar wants to burst out onto the pavement. The foreign academics pause and loiter. One of them, JP, who has taught in Pyongyang for a few years now, senses an opportunity. He takes Mr. K to one side. Mr K knows what’s coming. JP’s charm makes life so difficult for Mr. K. ‘No, JP, we can’t’ comes even before the question is raised. Though many more words are spoken, nothing can change, and JP knows that Mr. K would be in trouble if he allowed it to happen. It would be too much. It could never happen. Meanwhile, the government drinkers, all with uniforms of one sort or another, started noticing the academics outside. Slowly, the drinkers began to nudge and point.

One man in particular, tall and powerful looking in an over-sized olive-green uniform, beer mug waving in his fist, finds the foreigners amusing. Not exactly waving hello, not exactly not. What was that look? Contempt? Amused disdain? Unlike many the foreigners had seen on their various curated adventures, this man and his drinking partners did not avoid looking them in the eye. They were on top of their world. Alcohol subsidised. Their world was enough, and there was no future that that government man could imagine where he wasn’t where the action was, where he wasn’t making his way to the top.

Inside the bar, interest in the foreigners gradually drifted, and JP’s hectoring of Mr K ran its course. It was never ever even a remote possibility. But in Pyongyang anything seems possible. Like children the academics didn’t always understand why, so they kept asking.

The excitement was over, and the group walked down the road to mill about and take some pictures of the square and the emerald green lights that illuminate the Grand People’s Study House. Later at the restaurant on the river they get drunk, but everyone, except Mr. K of course, wishes they were drinking in the government bar.