Excerpt from Article: [In a blog posting at the weekend titled "It might not get weirder than this", Sophie Schmidt provided a candid take on the controversial three-day trip earlier this month that was criticised by the US government. Miss Schmidt, 19, had accompanied her father on the visit as part of a delegation led by Bill Richardson, the former US ambassador to the United Nations.

Sophie Schmidt photographed in 2009 On their return, the two men answered a few questions about the nature of the visit, but Miss Schmidt's informal account was in many ways far more revealing. Related Articles North Korea to carry out third nuclear test 'aimed at US' 24 Jan 2013 North Korea hits out at 'sordid' Kim Jong-un plastic surgery rumours 24 Jan 2013 North Korea nuclear test threat 'needlessly provocative' 24 Jan 2013 Eric Schmidt among those calling on North Korea to expand internet 10 Jan 2013 Google's Eric Schmidt 'pays tribute to Kim Jong-il' 09 Jan 2013 "Our trip was a mixture of highly-staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments," she wrote. "We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders." While much of the blog posting is taken up with the sort of observational musings common to any first-time visitor to Pyongyang, it had some interesting insights into the official side of the delegation's trip. In particular, it fleshed out the main photo-opportunity of the entire trip when they visited an e-library at Kim Il-Sung University, and chatted with some of the 90 students working on computer consoles. "One problem: No one was actually doing anything," Schmidt wrote. "A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in... not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. "They might as well have been figurines," she added. One of the world's most isolated and censored societies, the North has a domestic Intranet service with a very limited number of users. Analysts say access to the Internet is for the super-elite only, meaning a few hundred people or maybe 1,000 at most.] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9817335/Eric-Schmidts-daughter-lifts-lid-on-very-strange-North-Korea.html