Things to Do in Pyongyang in March

Pyongyang's metro runs over 100 metres (328 feet) below ground, built to double as a nuclear shelter. Two of its stations are open to foreign visitors on nearly every tour itinerary. The descent on the escalator alone takes close to four minutes. The air grows noticeably warmer and damper as you drop below the frozen streets above. Down at platform level, Puhung and Yonggwang stations feel less like transit infrastructure and more like underground palaces. You will see vaulted ceilings, brass chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling mosaic murals depicting revolutionary scenes in greens, golds, and deep reds. The marble floors echo underfoot. The trains themselves are older stock, their doors clanking shut with a mechanical finality that modern systems have engineered away. In March, the contrast is striking. You step from -2°C (28°F) wind at street level into the warm, still, chandelier-lit hush of a station 110 metres below. The platforms are quiet during off-peak hours. Your guides will typically allow enough time for photographs. This is one of the few places in Pyongyang where the scale of the architecture works at a human level rather than a monumental one.

The war museum complex on the west bank of the Pothong River is the most elaborately staged museum experience in Pyongyang, and possibly in all of East Asia. The building itself is enormous. Its marble corridors are chilled in March to a temperature that makes your breath faintly visible. The exhibits run from captured American military hardware arranged in an outdoor courtyard to a 360-degree rotating panorama painting of the Battle of Taejon that spans an entire circular room. The painting is technically notable regardless of your politics. The brushwork and lighting effects were executed by teams of artists over several years. The rotating viewing platform gives the unsettling impression of standing inside the battle. Outside, captured tanks and artillery pieces sit in rows, their metal icy to the touch in the March cold. The monument circuit beyond the museum connects several of Pyongyang's most imposing landmarks on foot, including the Chollima Statue on Mansu Hill and the Arch of Triumph, which stands taller than its Parisian counterpart and frames a view down a wide, nearly empty boulevard. In March, with few other groups on the route, you can experience these spaces at something approaching their intended scale without being funnelled through at speed.

The drive south from Pyongyang to Kaesong takes roughly three hours along a highway that is, by any standard, surreal. A six-lane motorway virtually empty of traffic, its concrete surface cracked in places, with the occasional military checkpoint and long views across flat, brown agricultural land still frozen at the edges in March. Kaesong itself is the only place in North Korea where pre-war Korean architecture survives in any concentration. The old quarter's tile-roofed houses cluster along narrow lanes. The cold March air carries the smell of wood smoke and kimchi fermenting in earthenware pots sunk into courtyard floors. Lunch is typically Kaesong-style pansangi, a traditional Korean meal served in a dozen small brass bowls on a low table: pickled radish, dried fish, cold tofu, and a clear broth that cuts through the chill. From Kaesong, the route continues to Panmunjom and the DMZ itself. Standing in the Joint Security Area in March, with frozen ground underfoot and the blue UN negotiation huts sitting in the no-man's-land between the two Koreas, the tension is physical. The silence is almost total except for the wind and the occasional crackle of a loudspeaker in the distance.

The Tower of the Juche Idea rises 170 metres (558 feet) above the east bank of the Taedong. On a clear March day, when the pollution haze lifts and the sky goes pale blue, the view from the top observation deck reaches across the entire city and into the hills beyond. The elevator ride is quick. The observation platform is open to the elements, and at 9°C (49°F) with wind, you feel every degree. Below, the Taedong stretches north and south, its surface still carrying thin shelves of grey ice at the edges in early March, the water dark and sluggish. Coming back down, a walk along the river embankment heading north toward Okryu Bridge offers one of the few moments in Pyongyang that approaches solitude. The embankment path is wide, paved, and in March, mostly empty. The air smells of cold stone and the faint mineral tang of river water. Across the water, the western skyline presents Pyongyang's most recognizable silhouette: the unfinished concrete pyramid of the Ryugyong Hotel, 330 metres (1,083 feet) tall, dominating everything around it like a set piece from a film that was never completed. In the flat March light, with no foliage to soften the geometry, the effect is stark and memorable.

Pyongyang naengmyeon, the city's signature dish and arguably its single greatest contribution to Korean cuisine, is a bowl of thin buckwheat noodles served in an icy beef broth with sliced cucumber, pickled radish, a halved boiled egg, and a sharp vinegar-mustard dressing on the side. At Okryu Restaurant, which has been serving this dish since 1960 from a massive building on the bank of the Taedong, the broth arrives so cold it numbs your teeth, and the noodles have a particular springy, almost rubbery chew that takes a few bites to understand. The mustard hits the sinuses first, then the vinegar opens up the sweetness in the broth. Eating cold noodles in a dining hall where the March air seeping through the windows is itself barely above freezing feels counterintuitive, and it is, but this is the dish Pyongyang considers its own, served year-round regardless of temperature. The dining hall itself is enormous, seating hundreds, with a formality to the service that feels closer to a state banquet than a lunch stop. Okryu has operated for over sixty years and remains the most famous restaurant in North Korea by a wide margin.

The twin bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill stand over 20 metres (66 feet) tall. They overlook the city from a raised terrace backed by a mosaic mural of Mount Paektu. A visit here is obligatory on every tour. The protocol is specific. You will be expected to bow. Your guides will instruct you on the etiquette before you approach. Whatever your personal politics, the physical experience is striking. The statues are massive enough to alter the feel of the air around them. In March, the terrace is swept by a cold wind that makes the silence feel deliberate rather than passive. The granite underfoot is polished smooth and slippery when frosty. From Mansu Hill, a short drive brings you to Mangyongdae. This is the rural birthplace of Kim Il-sung, preserved as a museum compound on the outskirts of the city. The thatched-roof farmhouse sits in a landscape of bare winter trees. The frozen earth crunches underfoot. The guides narrate with a practiced intensity that is itself part of the experience. The contrast between the monumental statues and the modest farmhouse is deliberate. It lands differently when you see both in a single morning.