Goodbye, Korea!

Well, my feet are back on US soil. Since my Korean adventures are now over, this blog will be retired. The food blog may still see some occasional action, but it obviously won't be Korea-centric. Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. Anyanghigyeseyo for now!

CAREER Award

I finally received official notice of my NSF CAREER award today. It was recommended for funding back in January, but I guess it just took this long to makes its way through the system. Regardless, I'm glad that I got it! w00t!

Weekend Trip to Osaka

This past weekend, I took a trip to Osaka to visit a friend from school. Trip details are on my old blog, and food stuff will still be posted to the food blog.

DMZ

Sue and I took a tour to the DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone between South and North Korea) this past weekend. [Note: this entry has been post-dated] The tour that's run by the USO was full, so we had to go with a Korean tour company. We got up early and took the subway to the bus pickup location. From there, it was a not-too-long bus ride north. The first stop was an observatory.

View of North Korea in the distance. Pictures must be taken from behind a line which is maybe twenty or so feet from the railing:

The next stop was to the Third Tunnel. South Korea has discovered four tunnels so far dug by North Korea burrowing through the granite under the border. These were discovered based on information from defectors from the North. We weren't allowed to take any pictures there unfortunately. Besides the actual UN Joint Security Area (later in this post), I think the 3rd Tunnel was the most interesting site.

We also made a stop at this railroad station. This is going to be the last stop in South Korea on a train line that they hope will eventually open to connect the North and the South.

Army guards in the train station. These poor guys just have to stand there while tourists keep marching up to them to get their pictures taken with them. The guy on the right is just adjusting his helmet, but I like to pretend that it's his reaction to having to put up with all of the tourists.

Next stop: the bridge of freedom. This is supposed to be where they did a whole bunch of prisoner exchanges between the North and the South.

View of the bridge.

The end of the bridge is all fenced off. Lots of people leave flags, notes to loved ones, etc. here.

A view of barbed wire, fencing, and a guard post in the background.

Right outside where they had the Bridge of Freedom, there was this small amusement park-like area. This seemed really out of place in such a solemn site, but I guess you gotta keep the kids entertained while the parents go do more serious things.

After some lunch at a Korean Restaurant, we made our way to the official UN JSA (Joint Security Area) of the DMZ. This area is jointly patrolled by North Korea and the UN (which includes the South). After the orientation talk (in Powerpoint!), our group went into the main JSA accompanied by a US soldier from Florida (but officially serving for the UN). We got to go into the Military Armistice Commission (MAC) building where they have the official talks between the North and the South. This building actually straddles the border, and so you can enter a tiny bit of North Korea while inside.

View from the MAC. Left side is South Korea, right side is the North.

My feet with one in the South (left) and one in the North (right).

North Korean guard tower.

Gigantic tower with gigantic North Korea flag. The town below is a "propaganda village" which is supposedly only occupied by guards and loud speakers that blare North Korean propaganda (we were too far away to hear any though).

That pretty much rounded up the trip. Definitely worthwhile for anyone who happens to end up this direction. If you plan on taking a tour, make sure to book your reservations early.

Fun with PC 방's

While Sue's been visiting Seoul, she's continued her regular day job working for Microsoft. Unfortunately, there appears to be some sort of firewall here at KU that's making her VPN connection back to the corporate network not work (must be a different protocol than GT's, because my VPN connection works). She's mostly just arranged to work on things that didn't need access to their intranet, but the other day she had to access some internal server. So, we marched on down to a local "PC 방" (pronounced sort of like PC-bong), which is basically like a Internet cafe type of place, but more often used for playing games rather than checking your email. These PC joints are actually all over the place. You can use a PC there for about $1 an hour, so I'm not sure how they make enough money to even pay for rent.

In any case, we went inside and asked if we could connect Sue's laptop to their network. After a few minutes of the guy at the front desk half not understanding us, and half just saying "no", he just took us to a computer probably so he wouldn't have to deal with us anymore. So we then managed to get all of the necessary networking information off that box (which was a little tricky because all of the menus were in Korean and whenever the box was connected to the network some full-screen interface would automatically pop up and steal focus from anything else; we eventually managed to kill it and you can see the Windows ipconfig dump in the picture above), unplug its network cable, plug in Sue's laptop, and voila we were on the 'net with no firewall. I'm not sure if they really appreciate us plugging random computers into their network, but it got the job done.

Yeouido

Sue and I took an afternoon trip over to Yeouido, which is a quasi-island along the Han river in Seoul. (I think it's technically an island in that it has water on all sides, but the water on one side is really more or a tiny stream that looks like you could wade through it without much difficulty.)

Yeouido park.

Statue of King Sejeon in the park.

Sunset view of Seoul from Building 63 (big, golden-colored skyscraper on the island).

View of Seoul (south of the Han) starting to change into its nighttime colors.

Building 63 also has a small aquarium. Not bad, but pretty small and pales in contrast to Atlanta's mega-behemoth Georgia Aquarium.

Potpourri

The cherry blossoms have begun to bloom. Quite pretty, but I guess Koreans have not made cherry blossom viewing into the same full-contact sport that it is in Japan (which is good since you don't have to fight any crowds just to see some trees).

I just thought that this was a pretty funny scene. At the end of the alley is a place where they compact cardboard boxes, presumably for recycling. I hadn't even noticed it until my friend pointed it out to me, but for whatever reason, someone decided to stick a giant red umbrella on top of all of the crushed boxes. It just looked really out of place.

It's a knock-off SMART car. Lacking anything to give you a proper measurement of the car's dimensions, I sacrificed myself so that you can get a much better feel for how small this car is. (I'm 6'1" for reference.) I think this one may even be slightly smaller than the SMART, but I'm not certain.

K-Pop Idol

So pop music and pop stars can be found all over this planet, but it's still entertaining to see it here.

This was some sort of "live" outdoor show/concert in front of one of the department stores in DongDaeMun. Except it wasn't totally live in the concert sense because they were doing multiple takes of the same song. However, if you make it big, you can...

... show up on a pair of socks! The ultimate pinnacle of pop stardom! What better way to demonstrate your devotion to your favorite pop star than to put them on your feet and stomp all over their faces! Interesting indeed... (We found these in a store specializing in pop-idols in NamDaeMun.)

Weird Items

So Paul (the theory TA) and I frequent this BBQ joint near campus, and we've been there enough times that they treat us pretty well. (I think they may be somewhat entertained by the fact that these foreigners keep coming back.) Anyway, we've gotten many "service" items from them, which are basically free things given out as a "thank you for your patronage" gesture. I find this particularly interesting given that there's pretty much no tipping in Korea, and so this is almost like some sort of anti-tip. We've gotten free cokes, free beer and free soju. On a recent trip, they gave us a gold piggie bank to add to the wall behind the register. I'm not exactly sure what this is all about, but I guess all of their regular customers get to be "shown off" on the wall of pigs. Or perhaps it has something to do with this being the year on the pig in the lunar zodiac? I don't know, but we now have a pig with our names on it in Seoul.

I've seen some interesting items in stores in Korea. Here's one that I saw recently that particularly struck me as odd:


Do you get a love virus from drinking this milk? Or is it milk for people that love virii? (This was not an actual container for milk, but some sort of gift box that you might put presentes into.)

And I didn't know that they were into the Dirty South... O-kaaay! Ye-eah!

Atlanta for a Week

I just got back into Seoul after spending a week back in Atlanta. Not surprisingly, there were many meetings and in the end the week seemed to go by too quickly. It was good to have a face-to-face re-synch with my students, and I also got to meet with both a prospective faculty candidate as well as a few prospective ECE PhD students. I also got a chance to catch up on the consumption of American foods that are difficult/impossible to find in Korea.

In any case, here were a couple of pictures from my flight to Atlanta.

A good towel if you need to be refreshed, but don't mind the side-effect of not having any more children.

They try to keep you pretty well entertained on the flight. Each seat has its own in-seat entertainment, with video-on-demand (20-30 movies with full pause/fwd/rew capabilities, music, and some unexciting video games).

I've been trying to do some sort of activity with the students each semester as sort of a group/team-building thing. Last semester we went out for dinner and a movie. This semester was a little tougher since I'm in Korea. I had planned on attending the Thrashers vs. NY Rangers hockey game anyway, so I brought along the students who could make it.

Action down in the Thrashers' defensive zone (including obligatory fans banging on the glass).

End of the game announcement of the "three stars of the game." We got a little bit of bonus hockey as the game went into overtime, and the Thrashers' ended up winning 2-1 on an OT power play goal.

Magritte

This past weekend I took the subway over to the Seoul Museum of Art. They had a Rene Magritte exhibition going on. It was about $10 to get in which is actually pretty expensive by Korean standards, but about on par with the US. It was a pretty good show. They didn't have too many of the more famous works, but they had a pretty good variety from different periods of Magritte's life.

Museum atrium. You can see that it was pretty crowded.

A view of the museum foyer.

Weather Rollercoaster

Wow, I've gone through a wide range of weather lately. Right before my Singapore trip, the weather in Seoul was in full spring mode. Sunny and mid- to high-50's. Then I went to Singapore, where it was in the 90's. Then when I got back to Seoul, it's winter time again!!!


View from my office window. You can see all of the snow blowing by.

Later that afternoon, on top of Hana Square.

Looking the other direction. Hopefully it'll warm up again soon.

Singapore Ice Hockey Tournament

Pretty much anywhere I go, I like to be able to play ice hockey. (That was part of my background research on Atlanta before I even interviewed at GT.) This semester in Seoul is no different. I'm currently playing with a group of Canadians who live in Seoul. This group (the Rocky Mountain Tavern Chiefs) organized a team to fly down to Singapore to compete in a tournament there. You don't get too many opportunities like this in life (how many people can claim they've played ice hockey in the tropics?), so after clearing it with Sue, I was off to Singapore. Since this doesn't really have to do with Korea directly, I'll be dumping the relevant posts and photos to a separate blog (food stuff will still show up on the food blog) to avoid cluttering stuff here any further.

Bowling!

This saturday, the hockey team went out for an afternoon of bowling! Seoul is a very crowded city, so where do you put a bowling alley?

Underground, underneath a supermarket that's already underground as well! So, go down two flights of stairs and you find:

A rather small bowling alley. I think it had about eight lanes in total. We played about three games. This was the first time I had been bowling in quite a few years, so I ended up bowling pretty pathetically (I got a 66 on one game! ha ha!).

Also interesting is that this will probably have been the only time I'll ever bowl at a place where the snack bar serves Mandu (Korean dumplings) and Ramyun (ramen noodles) instead of pizza and beer. Overall, this wasn't as weird as the time I went bowling in Istanbul (was there for a conference in 2002), but that's another story.

Seoul by Night

These are just some pictures I took when Sue and I were wandering around Seoul on (lunar) New Year's Eve.

This is a picture of GyeongGyeCheon Stream, which runs through the middle of town (or the side of town that's North of the Han River). It was really nice to walk at night with all of the buildings on either side all lit up. There were a lot of families and couples out taking holiday pictures along the stream. Underneath one of the bridges there was a neat photo gallery showing the area over the years. After the Korean war, the stream was really polluted and the areas around it were basically shantytowns. In the 60's and 70's the whole area was paved over with a street followed by an elevated expressway. It wasn't until the 2000's when they re-renovated the stream to its current pedestrian-friendly state.

I'm not sure where this was (we were wandering around town sort of at random). I think it was somewhere off the main road between Jongno sam-ga and Jongno o-ga. I just liked the view of the narrow street with all of the lights.

This was a very pretty pavilion with a gigantic bell (that yellow thing on the second floor). It's called the Bosingak bell pavilion, and the bell is only rung three times a year (New Year's Day, Independence Movement Day (March 1st), and Liberation Day (August 15)).

Sell Out

This just caught my eye because of Jackie Chan. This is Jackie Chan's noodle and dim sum restaurant at the COEX mall in GangNam; and you thought he sold out when he did The Tuxedo... (I'm just being mean, I do like a lot Jackie's movies, and I'd probably be worse if I were in his shoes.)

김치!

(If you're seeing little squares here and there, that means your computer does not support or doesn't have Korean fonts installed.)

Kimchi is the national food of Korea, so it's not too surprising to have a museum dedicated to it! Sue and I had to go check it out. We got there without much time before closing, but luckily it's a pretty small museum so 45 minutes was actually plenty of time to see most of it.


This was neat. Just all sorts of kimchi fermenting jars from different time periods and geographical locations. I forget the source of the wooden "jars," but it was basically from a region where clay making was difficult, so they improvised with hollowed-out tree trunks.


They had a lot of plastic models of kimchi showing off the different kinds. This one caught my attention in particular: persimmon kimchi! Not an ingredient that I would have thought to ferment.


They also had a little nutritional section on kimchi with cute cartoon renditions of kimchi's lactobacilli. This one shows the bad bacteria dying off (and they've got halos as they float off to heaven!). Pretty entertaining way to teach about bacterial biology and fermentation.

Interesting note: during the SARS outbreak a few years ago, they noticed that the SARS incidence rate in Korea was relatively low compared to the rest of Asia, and so they attributed it to eating kimchi. As a result, kimchi sales in China and Japan shot through the roof!

Old Skool Armaments

We were walking around DeokSuGung Palace, and they had this cool ancient weapon on display. Basically, it's an old fashioned machine gun of sorts. You load a rocket-propelled arrow/missile into each of the little holes, tie all of the fuses together, and light it. I forget the exact number, but I think they said the range was something like 200 yards. So you can shoot 100 lethal projectiles all at once with a decent range. Pretty impressive!

Advertise everywhere!

I thought this was pretty great/bad. These are LCD displays as you're getting on to an escalator. I guess if there's a slight back-up or line to get on the escalator, then those few seconds are enough to get a message across to you.

Happy Year of the Pig/Boar

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Sue was in town this past week so we spent a bit of time wandering about. I'll try to get all of the pictures blogged up over the next few days.

This last sunday was the lunar new year (a.k.a. "Chinese New Year"). We now enter the year of the pig, or sometimes called the boar. Or for the carnivores, the year of pork. Mmm...

So, some new year's related pictures:


We saw this display in Insadong. It was a whole flight of stairs filled with an assortment of pigs. There were a couple of funny ones, like a pig with antlers, and another pig with a tiger's tail. It was a funny sight.



At New Year's time, many people give gifts to each other. The folks at KU were very nice and gave us each a box of traditional Korean sweets. This box was very ornately presented, and there's actually a second layer of goodies underneath what you see in the picture above. I probably can't eat all of them before they start to go stale (I gave out a few in class today).



To get an idea of what lengths some people go to, here's a gift box of fish... that costs 500,000W. That's over $500USD!!! How could a box of dried fish cost so much? I'm told that these are special native Korean fish, hand raised in some sort of hollowed-out bamboo container.



We also found this neat little area that had one statue for each of the 12 symbols of the eastern zodiac. The close up is of this year's celebrity.