Second Busan Trip

So it's been a while since my last post -- I could come up with several different excuses but rather than doing that I'll just write it and you can guess!

The last post was on a Friday morning before falling asleep for the night (really early) about my 1 month anniversairy.   After going to work that day I boarded the KTX train with Aurora for Busan for an awesome beach weekend!

The first couple pictures I have for you guys document an interesting social thing over here -- couples will oftentimes wear matching outfits when they go out!  Now -- it's a pretty tricky thing to catch on camera without your subjects realizing that you're doing it so my strategy was to play "angry birds" on my phone and then switch to the camera when I thought I had a good shot.  The next question is how many pictures people have taken of me while playing angry birds?

We finally caught up with the rest of the crew around 10pm and found out that they had already started the party without us (well dinner anyways...)  The first thing we did was head to Haeundae Beach (you'll remember this from my first week in Korea) and the two of us that were actually willing to put our feet in the water took some pictures:

Hopefully you recognize the dude in the first picture; but the second pictures is my buddy Wallace -- who would later that evening be re-named "Le-mur" by some French tourists.  One of the french guys (picture below) conviced Walls into playing a game with some beer bottles -- it was a bit of a trick getting the bartender to give them the caps; but in the end they suceeded:

 
The goal was to knock the cap off of your opponents bottle with the cap from your own.  Walls played quite skillfully, thus earning the respect of the frenchman.  Of course, after earning said respect; you've gotta do the manly pose:

Next we headed (with the french guys) to a club in the basement of a Hotel.  The ended up not letting us in because some of us were wearing sandals.  But they had a really wicked hallway:

The next morning was pretty rainy but we went to check out the beach anyways.  It was pretty cool because the whole area was blanketed in a dense layer of fog; so visibility was at an all time low.  It also made it super tricky to take good photos:

After that we went to the Busan Aquarium -- which was actually really cool.  Since I'm not a marine biologist I'd be really bad at claiming to know what these different species actually ARE -- but I'll go ahead and post the better of the pictures anyways (the rest will be on the Picasa Web Album, of course.)

This guy had a really big forehead!

Penguins!  This species has a rather interesting name... I wonder where it came from?:

Then there were these tutle guys:

Dude's just chillin'.   There were some other turtles with these incredibly long necks:

This next video is a rather long one from one of the large fish tanks in the Aquarium:

There were a bunch of tanks with eels in them, but I thought this guy was the coolest:

 

And there was this really sick-looking flourescent (unless it was the lights) jellyfish:

And the massive octopus was hiding out in the rocks, so we couldn't really get a good gimpse at him:

This guy was hiding out too, but did a much better job:

SHARKS!!!

After finishing up at the aquarium Jeff and I decided to grab a bite to eat.  It was my first time eating at the Korean Fast-Food chaine "Lotteria"

They actually use a never-before-seen technique to wrap the burger:

Jeff and I, having misplaced our comrades, decided to chill on the rainy (foggy) beach for a while.  The way that the clouds caressed the mountains around the ocean was really neat:

We also got to get a sneak peek of some group practicing for a performance.  It was pretty neat to see them up on the stage in their street clothes -- I still don't know who it was.

Every once and a while some older Korean couple will offer to take your picture:

After that we ventured into the city to try to do a tour up Busan Tower (of course we shouldn't have bothered, it was too rainy/cloudy, but we made it TO the tower anyways.)  One of the things you can see on the way is the massive LOTTE Mall:

After climbing a great deal of stairs (escalators actually; which was weird) in the pouring rain (actually they were covered) we made it to the base of Busan Tower.  Here you can see another dragon:

And this is a pic of my buddy Wang with his umbrella up in the air!

Who then returned the favor:

You can tell how badly I need a haircut!  After the tower (base) experience we wandered around the city for a bit until we came across some awesome street-food:

We tried all sorts of stuff -- above is walls eating some kind of crab-cake cooked into some kind of pancake and smothered with sauces.  Below is a more traditional american visit to Baskin' Robins:

And Kalon REALLY liked his green-tea flavored shake:

This whole time the rain was coming down as if there were firehoses in the sky.  I was wet and freezing but we kept going anyways.  Later we met up with the others, who were at the famous Busan fish-market -- we didn't get a chance to look around too much because we all wanted to get warm and dry but at least here's a picture of the gate:

The rest of the evening was pretty chill.  We went back to our hotel and got dry and then headed out to check out the nightlife.  Ken and I separated from the others when they sat down to dinner (we weren't particularily hungry) and we got to spend some time hanging out with some bartenders at the GEKO bar -- We didn't intentionally sit down at the part of the bar where they do the dish-washing, but it turned out to have been an awesome decision:

Later, I bought one of their T-Shirts -- which actually says STAFF on the back!  This way I could really start fitting in:

And eventually, the rest of the crew caught up with us:

The next day we took a boat tour along the coast, which let us see some really beautiful scenery:

 In this one you can see some guys about to do some Cliff-Jumping!  The cityscape from the water:

Aurora Chillin':
 

Girls with hats, and a nice view of the bridge in the back:

There was a super-small island out in the sea that had a super-modern lighthouse on it that looked more like some kind of research lab.  You couldn't even see the lighthouse from land:

As you can see we lucked out and got a super sunny beautiful day; so the next thing we did was head to the beach to enjoy it.  We revisited the wall murals that I shared with you guys my first week in Korea:

After this we went to get some eat and then headed to the beach.  Some of the crew just were just lounging out on the beach, and some of us went swimming (Kalon, Aurora and I) but after chris showed up we just went for a walk along the water:

And then we saw these crazy guys trying to use an inflatable bed as a floatation device:

We came back to find everyone passed out:

After this we went to back to the train station, just in time to take some more pounce shots on another matchy-matchy couple (double date this time):

Then we got some more food before boarding the train back home:

Once we got back to Seoul we had to take a Taxi back to SNU because the metro's were shut-down.  But all in all it was a great weekend!

More posts are coming but since this one is super long I'll leave it at that for now!

One Month Anniversary

So, it's been one month as of "Today" meaning, July 8th.  While not much has happened since the last time I wrote (except for some nice research) I feel compelled to inscribe some general things about Korea that I feel like I can comment on after a month of living in the country.

Generally; if you want to imagine Korea, take America, get rid of all of the diverse micro-cultures and compress it to the size of Virginia.  Next, make all the people Korean (with a shake or two of foreigners -- they have less foreigners here than we have in Newark by far...) and throw the whole thin on top of a blanket of beautiful mountains.  Make the climate almost exactly like Delaware -- a little less hot and a little less humid, but with a monsoon season.

Nows the fun part -- Amplify EVERYTHING and then add a bunch of advertisements for plastic surgery, some traditional customs, and some weird foods.

Now you have Korea.  So let me go into a bit more detail about what I mean.  When in Korea: they party harder, they work harder and more efficiently, they relax harder, they play harder... Everything is more intense.  Now you know about the food because I've been blogging about it for months so I won't go into that; as well as the customs.

Also, people here put a lot of importance on appearance, and I'm not just talking about the prevalence of plastic surgery (they like the double-eyelids, nose jobs, jaw reconstruction, and removing muscle from their legs to make them thinner), but all around people pay a lot more attention to how they dress themselves in the morning and the fashion is a lot nicer for it -- you don't see people walking around in stained white T shirts with holes in them, or beaters, or any of that stuff.  The women tend to wear dresses a lot more (and have really cute umbrellas) and dudes always try to either look cool or sharp. 

That said, grad student attire is identical.  Jeans, t-shirts (relatively clean) or button ups.  There's a little bit less of an emphasis on formal safety and I haven't come to a conclusion on whether or not that's good.  It's not that people aren't safe, it's just that they have the option not to be -- their safety is in their hands, rather than some "officially appointed safety person".  Graduate student life is pretty much the same as it is back home for me as well; get into the office around 10/10:30pm, work for an hour or two then go to lunch, work till dinner and then stay ridiculously late.  The whole 12-14 hour day thing seems to be a staple of my field and position.

Now some of the cultural things about the lab group are pretty different.  They're a pretty tight knit group; they all know everything (almost) about one another and support each other both in their work and in their personal lives.  There's always one student who's appointed as the "Captain" and who keeps a track of everyone else -- that means if you're going to leave early to have dinner with your girlfriend, or if you think you're going to sleep in the next day; you should tell him.  They also try to go on "member training" trips together (like Seoraksan) and share two meals a day together (roughly).

The lab group that I'm in is super awesome and I've enjoyed every minute of it -- I've already started calling these guys my brothers (and sisters); in Korean of course!

Now some more general things -- you can tell that the country has expanded quite rapidly.  Almost nothing that is here now was here before 1953(ish) -- the end of the Korean war.  Even the traditional and historic stuff has gone through serious rennovations in order to make up for that struggle -- and if you'd see the terrain here it would instantly hit you how hard it must have been for the soldiers...

A good example is Hyundai motor company -- it was founded in 1967 and in collaboration with Ford, started building cars.  It built it's first solo car in 1975 which was built mostly with imported technologies, and in 1988 produced the first all-Korean car.  Today it is the 4th largest automobile company in the world; and supplies MOST of the cars, trucks, buses, etc. in Korea.  In fact; finding a non-Korean car in Korea is super rare -- they're built by Hyundai, Samsung-Renault, or SsangYong (which was just bought out by an Indian company, but that doesn't count because it was so recent that the cars are still "Korean").

Korea has also developed an incredibly efficient public transit system, a very powerful telecommunications system and manages to keep it all clean and working.  Seoul doesn't even have "slums" -- there are a few homeless people but even they are scarce.  Crime rates are super low and everything is spotless (clean).  Now all of that stuff is also affordable -- the subway here is cheaper than places like New York and Paris, and I never have to worry about the metro workers going on strike; or getting onto a particularly nasty subway car.

To top it all off; the city-dwellers (and workers I suppose) are nice...   Now NYC and Paris (keep referring to these because they are also megalopolises that I've visited) can learn something from that.  If I ask a stranger (who doesn't know any English) for direction with my terrible set of Korean vocabulary and some creative hand-signs -- they will do EVERYTHING in their power to help me out.  It's really amazing.

Next, the 방 -- bangs.  Because of the population density in Korea having someone over to your house or apartment for dinner and a movie is rather impractical -- it's very rare to play host in that kind of a way.  So instead there are special "rooms" called "bangs" that cater to that same kind of entertainment.  So you might to to dinner together at a restaurant, then move to a bar, and once you're finished with that go to a Noraebang (norae = song; so song-room = karaoke) and sing your heart out.  Or you could go to a DVD-bang and chill and watch a movie on a comfy couch; a PC-bang and place some on-line video games (on a high-spec computer that you didn't have to pay for); a Jimjibang (or bathhouse -- sauna's, massages, hot tubs, that kind of thing) or even a Love-motel (which I will leave up to your imagination).  On top of that they have athletic complexes for super cheap -- you can get into a skate park for 5,000 won, or go to the batting cages for 1,000 won and hit about 20 fast-pitch balls (I'm actually getting decent at this...)

Arcades are affordable (they don't rip you off terribly) and are well located (one right next to the theater so you have something to do while you wait for the movie to start...)  They also have aloe drinks, yogurt drinks, cold canned coffee (affordable! equivalent to 50 cents!), and 24 hour institutions (shopping malls, convenience stores, restaurants...)   On top of that, there's no law against walking along the street with a beer (because people don't abuse it as much as we would back home) and there's not such a silly concept as "last-call" (seriously, it's WAY safer that way -- no one has any reason to want to drive home drunk; they can take there time and get sober first.)

Last thing -- whatever you think that you're "good at" you can find someone who specializes in it and is way better than you in Korea.  Whatever hobbies people seem to have here they seem to be really dedicated to -- you already know this from my post about Salsa dancing, but it's true about video gamers (you saw the TV channel dedicated to Starcraft), sports players (Soccer, Baseball, etc) and especially musicians.

That is all!  By the time it becomes "exactly" a month anniversary, I will be in the same town I was the first time I "stopped traveling" -- headed back to Busan!!

27 days later.

It's been almost exactly a week since the last time I blogged.  In fact; by the time I finish writing this post; it probably will be exactly one week.  That means I should be able to finish writing and uploading pictures within the next hour and a half.

Wednesday last week was a typical work day -- though several of us did go into town for dinner.  Kalon had left that morning for KIMS (via Busan) and so that evening instead of working or hanging out with friends I did the first thing that came to mind.

Salsa Dancing.

The Salsa club is called "TOP Bar" and is in Apgujeong, which is presumably the "ritzy" part of Seoul, but I didn't learn that until later; and I didn't notice it while I was there so who really knows?  Anyways, from the website that I found the club on I had assumed that when I showed up the club would have a very decent concentrations of foreigners (50%?)  Instead... I was the only one.

Now you think that since music is universal; dance would be too right?  But no.  What they call Salsa, we call Mambo -- and they are in fact very similar; but while Starts with a step forward on the first beat, Mambo starts with a step back on the second; so the syncapation is different.  Obviously it's fairly easy to "phase-shift" the basic steps by a beat; but once you get into fancier stuff it's really tricky to not fall back to your defaults.

Anyways I spent the first 45 minutes 70% watching and 30% dancing -- I did a really nice cha-cha with someone who I now assume must be an instructor of some kind (she wasn't danced with as much; but was very good) and when the music changed to dance music (club style) I did a hustle with a very very suprised Korean girl (until they switched the music because only we were dancing...)

But the biggest relevation/surpise is that the Korean dancers here are really good.  The average dancer at this place was probably about my level; maybe a touch better.  That means the great dancers were really great -- I saw some strange moves that I couldn't even begin to copy and some insane aerials and flips...

Well; after the first 45 minutes an English teacher (I think also a dance instructor -- on the side) introduced himself to me and helped me to actually understand what was going on (remember, up till this point there wasn't really anyone for me to talk to) and in general helped me feel a lot less awkward.  There was a "Salsa circle" for a girls birthday and I got to dance with her; trying my best to do moves that didn't care whether I was on 2 or 1!  But the next guy flipped her a couple times so whatever I did must have been super simple!

Anyways, the English teacher "Sam" told me that the Salsa scene in Seoul is actually fairly huge so I'm super psyched about checking it out!

The next day I had a meeting with Dr. Yu in the morning so I woke up bright and early and prepared a simplistic presentation of what I had done in the week and a half since arriving.  Most of it was spent learning out to compression mold fiberglass; and learning COMSOL -- multiphysics simulation software that lets me do stuff like:

OK, so this is my first try; and as such it's super non-fancy, but the thing in the middle is conductive, and the stuff around it is a piezoelectric ceramic (PZT) and the graph is a surfrace plot of the electric potential field (which is a good way of evaluating the electric field) in the"part."  Most of my effort late last week was trying to find the right mechanical, electrical and coupling properties to be able to simulate my materials instead of arbitrary ones.

Ok, readers relax -- technical part over.  Kalon came back later on Thursday and spent some time zonking out.  We still got a lot of work done though.  Here is the typical scene in the hallway during monsoon season (when it's raining):

EVERYBODY uses umbrellas here.  The "I don't need an umbrella" macho man doesn's exist.  (This might be contributed to by the fact that rain jackets are really really expensive -- I saw one for a thousand dollars...)

That evening we went for a run/jog/walk around half of the campus loop (the road that encircles SNU).  The coolest thing we saw was probably this Korean military utility vehicle on the side of the road:

The following day I got to work just in time to work for a few hours before leaving for Seoraksan.  (san = mount).  I jumped into Zen's car with my bags and we headed out.  The car ride was fairly pleasant -- Korea has a pretty nice highway system (modeled after ours I believe) and I ended up sleeping for a good bit of it.  Every while Zen would yell "Oh Shiii" -- microseconds later I'd be awake, then my synapses fire telling my hands to grab onto something; and before I knew it he had changed lanes or avoided something and I was sleeping again.  Korean drivers are pretty good but they are more aggressive.

When we got to Sokjo (the city close to Seoraksan) the first thing we did was go to "E-Mart" which is like the Korean version of Walmart.  Now because Korea has such a huge premium on space; instead of building it out, they build it up!  That means you have a Walmart-like complex which is 5 or 6 stories tall -- but then, how do you get your shopping cart from the first floor to the third and then back to your car?

Yes.  The carts go UP the conveyor belt.  The wheels have the same size grooves as the conveyor so that when you roll onto the belt the wheels and belt become interdigitated and the distance between the cart and the floor reduces -- then the "brake pads" which are mounted on the side of the wheels (that previously only had a couple milimeters of clearance from the ground) "touch-down" and the cart is "stuck" until you get to the top.

In any case; we got food and drinks with all the other necesseties and then left for the "Pension" -- which is basically a fancy word for "Cabin" we had a decently large space with two bedrooms, two baths, and a large combination dining room/kitchen/living room and a balcony with a large table for traditional Korean eating (sit on the floor.)  Dr. Yu showed up later with his wife and daughter and we proceeded to chill while drinking his favorite drink (I think) -- 90% beer, 10% soju.  The tastes actually balance out pretty well; the local beers arent very good and the soju is a bit strong.  Meeting up in the middle works out pretty well.

The follwing picture is Kalon, Dr. Yu, Mrs. Yu and me standing in front of a sunset over the mountains:

Next, some cooking and eating:

Then the beach -- I'll post this picture because I think it's funny; but try to not laught TOO hard...

And a nice group shot:

After that it was crazy party time, and then sleeping.  The next morning we woke up and immediatly rushed out the door to the mountain.  The hike up the first peak was cheating, because we started out in a cable car:

Which was followed by a 15 minute hike to the peak.  It was really strange up there because there were vendors on the top of the mountain; selling trinkets and souveniers.  Not only that but there was a fairly decent crowd...  I still managed to take some really good photos though.  Here's a group shot of the whole lab -- there were two people missing; Jina and Ryeoul.  Jina was sick and Ryeoul hadn't returned from military service yet.

Here's one of Kalon on the edge:

After descending it's a nice hike to the base of the other peak -- the large rocks in this picture:

It was a pretty nice hike, the whole thing is along a trail and follows the river almost the whole way:

At the end of which is a buddhist temple type area with a (supposedly) famous "rocking boulder" which you can shake by pushing, but you can never really tip over:

Now for the next section there are a lot of pictures which you will be able to find on the PicasaWeb Album so I won't post too many, but there are a couple really nice shots:

At this point I should mention that somewhere around 10-15% up the mountain I ran out of water to drink -- and I was already dehydrated to begin with.  I'll mention one thing -- hiking up a mountain while dehydrated is really really hard esspecially when you havent had breakfast...

And there were the steel stairs.  Lots and lots of stairs:

What was kind of neat was that under the more modern steel staircase, you could see the ancient stone staircase the proceeded it.  The stairs actually go all the way to the top:

Once Wonjin bought us some iced tea from the vendor up there.  And man was it good -- the liquid and sugar was enough to jolt me straight into being fully awake and almost 100% there.  That said; the hike down was super fun and pretty quick because I was able to run almost the whole way.  A couple times min and I took shortcuts through the woods; and I crossed a couple rivers.  I was very happy to find out the my boots are actually water proof up to something like 15cm deep water.  Almost at the end, here's a pic of the guys:

After I got to the bottom (I wish it had been before...) I learned a secret buddhist technique that lets you absorb water from the super humid air so that you don't have to bring water with you!  I was super good at it actually; here's me a few minutes after the first lesson:

They asked me to use the nozzle so that I wouldn't get water all over the place...  We had lunch on those tables that you see there in the background, then went back to the pension to shower and nap.

For dinner, after playing an awesome game of soccer on the beach, we went to the seafood market and had some really interesting foods...

This first one is sea squirt, and some kind of octopus or squid tentacles.  The sea squirt tasted a bit like clams and was pretty good, but I actually liked the tentacles better:

Next we ate my buddy mister crabs:

And ate a whole tuna.  Raw.  That had been flopping around before being killed in the kitchen a few minutes prior.

Some kind of other fish, sitting in a stew of delicious vegetables:

After dinner we went back down through the food market and got some famous street side fried shrimp (they just bread the entire shrimp and eat it; including the head and tail.  Yes. that includes shrimp eyeballs.)

That night we sat around and chilled for a while before going for a nice walk on the beach for a few hours.  We set off a couple firecrackers (which is legal on the beach here) and watched EVERYBODY ELSE set off theirs!  It was really cool; the entire beachfront was filled with small amatuer firecrackers lighting the whole place up.  After walking the length of the beach we got some ice cream and headed back in time to promptly pass out.

The next day consisted of getting in the car and driving back to Seoul.  It was weird because while I was sleeping in the car this time, I had a dream where I was in a car driving through America somewhere.  Now, the dream's length was probably about 4 or 5 hours, but it took place within 1 hour of actual car time; so by the time I got back to the dormitory, I felt like I had been in a car for 6 hours or so...  It was pretty exhausting.  After some some catching up on computering and showering, Kalon and I went into town to grab some Pizza.  After that he went to go watch a movie with a labmate and I went up to Itaewon to meet up with some EAPSIers who had come north for the weekend.  I got to spend about half an hour with Wallace, Liz, Katrina and Hui.  Eunice, Aurora and I then went to go watch Transformers 3 (which coincidentaly is what Kalon went to go see -- though he watched it in 3D).  Before the movie Aurora and I (while waiting for Eunice who had had to go back to her appartment first) took some "Egg Photos."  If I get a chance to I'll try to upload some of them, they're super funny.

After the movie went back.  I skyped with my family for a while and then sat around until I was tired enough to fall asleep.

Yesterday was just a regular work day -- Kalon and I left a bit early to get dinner with some EAPSIers in Insadon (a historic cultural district) where we loaded up with Dumplings and Koeran BBQ to celebrate American Independence day.  Then we walked around the city for a while before grabbing some beers and hanging out at the renovated creek for some serious chill time.


Today was super-productive mode at work.  I made some nice progress on my simulation and got some serious learning in about how dielectrics work; so now I sortof understand how to use Maxwells equations to describe both dielectric and conductive materials and how the conductivity and permeability combine to make the distinction.  I also learned about about complex permeability and the distinction between real (how much of the electric field is let into the material) permeability and imaginary (time lag from dipole movement that results in loss) interact with each other.  I also made some sweet plots plots...  This is a cropped section of another potential field:

Anyways, that's all I have for now.  Until next time!