POSCO like Hyundai is basically a small city just for itself. There arent a whole lot of places that do the entire process of making steel -- starting with Iron Ore and Coke. A lot of the steel used is actually recycled with the "mini mill" process -- used steel is melted down and reformed. POCSCO however does the former!
Rather than going through the whole process I'll just talk about the parts of the tour that were the coolest. We got to actually witness the steel going from a molten state to a giant coil ready for shipping. The first time we went through the plant not much was going on -- at least... To the untrained eye. To those who have studied the process however you could tell that they were changing out the rollers (anyone who took Dr. Fagerstrom's course will be able to talk about it). The rollers that make the steel are actually under super-tight tolerances and need to be changed out every once and a while so that the produced steel doesn't have any defects. So seeing them do the changeover was a rare event (for a tour) but very appreciated.
However, what the tourguide really wanted to show us was the molten hot steel being rolled into a coil -- just before the roll change process was finished we left the building and got back on the bus. The tourguide announced that we'd be going to another part of the plant where they did the same process (even though this one was about to be put back online) -- however, we ended up just going full circle!
It's amazing how much heat comes off of a slab of hot steel. You can feel the burn on your face as it rolls by and the entire atmosphere because super heated and thick -- next large rolling spurts of water which "float" over a the steel billow out -- floating on a layer of steam. The steel then goes through many many rollers; reducing many times in thickness and becoming much longer until it can be put into a coil, and later onto a truck or boat for transport.
After POSCO we grabbed a quick lunch and then went to the "Millennium Park" -- which is a amusement park for kids with a focus on learning about the Silla period (the first unified Korea) At the park we got to see two performances -- one was a play about a hero that saved the kingdom a few times; and one was a demonstration of martial arts and training. Here are some videos of the first performance -- you might want to mute your speakers before pressing play; there's a lot of "noise" (static)
Next we saw the martial artist demonstration which included sword fighting and horseback acrobatitcs, including things like firing a bow and arrow from a horse at a target or throwing a spear, vaulting, quick dissmount; cut off a guys head and remount. It was pretty cool:
After the millennium park we went to the Gyungju National Museum -- which also exhibits some of the artifacts from the Silla period. At this point, we were "all toured out" and super tired of museum... Though I'm sure next week when we're all trapped in our labs we'll regret feeling that way...
After the museum we we're rejoined by the guy in charge of our program -- Mr. Kim. He's currently writing his thesis in International Relations at Korea University while simultaneously working a full-time position at the NRF. I'm sure he'll be a super-mega big-shot soon. We went to a park that is known as the "Resting Place" of the nobles of the Silla Kingdom. Not to be confused with "Final Resting Place" -- there we're no dead bodies. We had gone there (us Americans...) expecting it to be a tomb... Instead it was really quite nice:
Next we went to a Restaurant for our firs "Traditional Korean" meal -- which meant we'd be sitting on the floor with our shoes off at the table which was slightly elevated. In super ancient Korea they actually used to use western-like chairs and tables, but as time progressed the moved to the floors to cope with the cold winter -- the stone floors were fire heated and especially with the paper walls the floor was a very warm place to be. As such the beds and dinner table were all very close to the ground.
Anyways the dinner was absolutely delicious -- hopefully you can get some of the remenant taste off of these pictures:
When we got back to the hotel we were determined to go swimming in the pool (which closes at 9pm) but it was 8:30. The back story is that the previous night we went down early to find out that it closed at 6:15pm because of some kind of vacation the recreational staff was taking -- and the night before we went down at 10pm to find out that it closed at 9pm.
Now this time - we should have had enough time for a 15 minute swim -- I went down to check and make sure it was open first and the woman at the desk told me that it was open for the next 20 minutes. We went and got changed, and came back down but the woman at the desk bluntly refused to let us. In the end she said we could spend 15 minutes swimming if we each gave her 8,000 won (bullcrap). Later our friend Hui went in and she told him that he could only use the Sauna (said nothing about a price...) When we tried to follow him she asked us for 6,000 won a head for the 5 remaining minutes. Later we'd find out that our friend Misha had gone to the Sauna every day so far and paid nothing. Racism?
In any case, the four of us that were super determined to not let our swim trunks travel dry decided to make our way to the lake behind the hotel. It was Charlie, Aurora, Hui and myself -- walking out of the hotel in bathing suits and slipper -- I was even wearing the hotel bathrobe over my suit! It was a pretty interesting sight. We found a way to get down to the side of the lake where there were these large blue buoy's and a strange looking diving board type thing; we then had a discussion with ourselves asking whether or not swimming in the lake was actually legal (we had seem some Korean's swimming a bit earlier).
Just in time to ask that question we heard the siren go off.
We turned around almost all of us saying some variation of "Let's get the **** outta here!!" and then...
We heard some Korean men laughing really hard -- and looked up to see a couple buisness men who were laughing and pointing to their cell phone (which had sounded the siren) and telling us that swimming was ok!
And man was it a good swim.
When we got back to the rooms; the evening partying had already begun -- I had enough time take a shower and swap clothes before busting out some soju and snacks, some intense chilling and then another trip to club Havana!
The next; and last day consisted of getting on the bus and driving back to seoul.
This photo is actually from a different day; but it tells the same story. Just pretend that we have already loaded all our massive pieces of luggage into the bus and that we all have decent sized back-packs.
Anyways, on the way to Seoul we got to watch a Bollywood movie that was in Hindi with Hangul subtitles -- every once and a while there'd be a phrase in English; but the acting was so good you didn't even need to understand. The film was called "My name is Khan" and was absolutely phenomenal -- if you can get an English subbed version you should watch it!
Just before getting off the bus it was decided that we'd head over to Charlie's place for the night (our dorm isn't ready until Sunday evening) and since Andrea was going the same way we figured we'd just take a pair of cabs. It took longer than expected for the cabs to arrive and Andrea and Kalon got in the first one -- so Charlie and I decided to venture underground and take the metro.
We managed to buy rechargeable RFID metro passes and put 10,000 won on it each; the first metro was quite crowded; but we managed to get on without getting in anyones way and slid into the corner so we could wait out the 16 stops the metro had to wait before our changeover. The line 2 (the metro we were on) is one of the main lines in Seoul and goes in a giant circle around the city. As we approached our changeover the car we were in became more and more comfortable and we made the changeover with relative ease -- it's pretty cool because every stop has a number associated with it; which makes it super easy to make sure you get where you want to be.
After the changeover we boarded another metro and got off at Korea University. After this we walked in a direction that we thought might be good for trying to find Charlies place (CJ house) and I stopped and asked some students for a pointer -- they said "Go up the hill and ask another man"; so we did. Up the hill we ran into two "foreigners" who pointed us in another direction -- they said to go through the buildings and then walk up the painfully steep looking hill. It wasn't until we made it up to the top of that hill that we found out that it was the wrong hill. We talked to a Korean student with perfect English who walked us down the hill and then pointed us up another (not as steep; but still steep) hill. Then we followed an older Korean man up that hill until he pointed out the building to us.
Charlie talked to the woman at the front desk who had no idea where he was supposed to stay -- she said to wait for the guys in his lab group to arrive. When they did there was another 15 minutes of discussion before it was decided that we were supposed to be in an adjacent building!! After that the rest was pretty easy. We got to Charlie's apartment, and then he handed me his card and key and went off to have the "Welcome Dinner" with his future lab-mates and advisor. I on the other hand walked over to the G25 convenience store to buy a sandwich and ramen, sat on Charlie's balcony and wrote the blog post that I posted last night.
Re-uniting with Andrea and Kalon turned out to be fairly hopeless; and still has yet to happen -- when Charlie got back we just passed out. This morning we got breakfast at a small shop and Charlie bought a cell phone -- the cell phone buying was a fairly painless process with the quick invention of a working pidgin and usage of math (universal language) and a brief stint of google translate -- Korean's actually use qwerty keyboards that have a button which toggle between latin script and hangul.
Next we went to a cafe (which plays some awesome jazz kicks) and got some coffee -- they don't have de-caf so I'll be really wired in a bit. Charlie's phone had a password on it so he had to run back to get another one while leaving all his "devices" here to charge. He just got back and that's about it!
Alright; well I hope these blog posts aren't tooooo long winded! But there's a lot to write about! I'm sure they'll get shorter come Monday or so when I spend most of my time working in the lab and less of my time on these random micro-adventure excursions through the thick wilderness of urban seoul. The next mission is to track down Kalon and Andrea and hope that they're both the way we left them. (Unless of course they've leveled up...)
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