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.

Facilities

The sign folks showed up this week and installed these signs at our offices. Now, we're "official"! (That's actually Venkat's sign; I'm in 510B which is the one that's out of focus in the background.) We don't know what the Korean script says underneath, but it sure didn't seem like it had anything to do with Georgia (at least not phonetically). Perhaps one of the Korean readers could leave a comment with a translation?



Here's a view of my office in case you're interested in what types of facilities we've got here. The overall size is larger than our KACB offices at GT, although the ceilings aren't nearly as high and the floors are not carpeted (this office is a lot deeper, but not as wide). You can see that the little conference table is actually quite a decent size (comfortably seats four people). What's also very interesting is that all of the professor offices here come with a sink and mirror! (You can see it just behind the bookcase/shelf in the center of the picture.) I'm not sure what the primary purpose of it is for (brushing your teeth, fixing up your hair?), but it seemed pretty novel nonetheless.

Amber Alert

Every now and then I get these Korean text messages on my phone. I obviously don't understand what it says, but I was told that it's sort of the equivalent to our "Amber Alert" back in the States. This seems really smart and potentially much more effective. Instead of just a few signs on our highways, this would near-instantenously make everyone with a cell phone aware of whatever child abductor or other wanted person was on the loose.

Routine

No new posts in a while. I think part of the reason is that I'm finally getting settled in and sort of have something approximating a routine going. Classes remain interesting, but they're mostly under control. I think the students are having somewhat of a tough time, but that's to be expected as they're taking both the theory and advanced operating systems classes at the same time. From my understanding, most of the students back in Atlanta tend to avoid this combination (in the same semester anyway). Many students also seem to have a weaker CS background (which I can relate to since I did EE in college before CS in grad school), which adds to the challenge for them. However, I'm also pretty confident that they'll rise to the challenge.

I'm probably going to miss the Super Bowl this year as I'd have to get to an ex-pat bar at like 8 or 9am Monday morning, which doesn't mix well with having to teach on Mondays.