I was only in North Korea for five days, but that was more than enough to make it clear that North Korea is every bit as weird as I always thought it was.

If you merged the Soviet Union under Stalin with an ancient Chinese Empire, mixed in The Truman Show and then made the whole thing Holocaust-esque, you have modern day North Korea...

...1) Kim Il Sung (1912 – 1994)

He's their George Washington and their Stalin and their Jesus and their Santa Claus combined, all in the form of one pudgy dead Korean man. He's the Eternal President—eternal because he had the position abolished for all future so that no one can ever be president again. And they've created an almost entirely fabricated story about all of the legendary accomplishments he didn't accomplish.

There are an estimated 34,000 statues of Kim Il Sung in the country, everything possible is named after him (if they were starting the country today, it would be called Kimilsungland), every adult is required to wear a pin on their shirt with his face on it every day, all students dedicate a large portion of their study to memorizing his speeches and learning about his achievements, and his birthday is the nation's biggest holiday. They even changed the year—it's not 2013 in North Korea, it's Juche 101 (101 years after Kim Il Sung's birth).

As tourists, we were told to only refer to him as President Kim Il Sung...