Next stop: Seoul Korea

What an incredible week. I was whisked around Seoul at very very high speed in traffic that made Manhattan seem like country roads... I left Seattle Saturday afternoon, arriving in Seoul Sunday night. Monday I gave scientific seminars to two very high profile institutes, and did I mention I had just been getting over a cold? I lost my voice officially on the flight over, resulting in my seminars being presented in the voice of Kathleen Turner smoking 6 packs a day :|
On the way to the seminar, the distributors were desperately trying to help me recover my voice by offering hot tea and coffee nonstop. They pulled to the curb at one point, ran into a convenience store and brought out canned coffee. When I was handed the can I discovered that it was HOT! I mean really really scalding hot. I threw it back and forth between my hands like a hot potato for the next half hour wondering why thermodynamics had managed to fail when I most needed the coffee to reach a less dangerous temperature in order to open and eventually drink it. I later learned in another convenience store visit that the cans sit on a normal, innocent looking shelf which somehow keeps the cans heated to an alarming level.

After the first seminar we came out to find a car parallel parked behind our vehicle, blocking it in. The three men I was with were in very posh business suits and proceeded to push the car out of the way. I thought they were crazy until the car very kindly rolled right out of the way for them...This was my first lesson in the brilliant methods Koreans have for dealing with their overcrowding problem.
If there is not a spot left in a parking lot, they simply parallel park behind others leaving their car in neutral to allow it to be pushed gently out of the way. After backing their vehicle out, the distributors then kindly pushed the car back to its original location.

As for the food... I ate small (~1-2 cm) objects in seafood soup that looked like brains. When you bite into them they squirt warm liquid into your mouth, then you spit out the slightly tough shell. I attempted 20 questions with them regarding these objects (Is it plant or animal?) and it turned out that they too could not identify the objects but had been eating them all of their lives. Every meal included kimchi (spicy fermented bok choy) which was fine with me as I was very much enjoying the kimchi, and every meal was spicy. They boast a high rate of stomach cancer in Korea due to consumption of so much spicy food. While I like spicy food, I must admit that I was relieved to eat something bland after a week of Kimchi and other intensely spicy foods!

Regarding the language... I had learned a little conversational Korean on the plane ride over (using a Pimsleur set I purchased the week before the trip), and promptly found that I could understand a few words when they spoke, but correct pronunciation is far more difficult than Japanese. I started to learn to pronounce some of the Korean alphabet, as well as the names of several key alcoholic beverages (those Koreans are quite enthusiastic about their alcohol!).

After a week of extremely hard work training new customers and giving a total of 4 scientific seminars the distributors took me out for "bomb liquor" on Friday night to celebrate a productive week. Bomb Liquor consists of Cass (a pale Korean beer made by Coors) with an empty shot glass floated in it then filled with Soju (20 proof Korean rice liquor) until it sinks to the bottom of the beer. When we were all good and buzzed they proceeded to teach me how to cuss in Korean. It was highly amusing and definitely a piece of the language you don't get from Pimsleur!

My hosts were very enthusiastic about taking me through the Korean National Museum as well as to Changdeokgang Palace, shown in 2 pictures above, to learn about Korean culture and history. It was really fascinating. I got to attend the 1 year birthday party of my Korean colleague's first baby which is given the importance of a wedding with maybe 100 or more family members attending. During the party the baby is presented with an array of trinkets which each symbolize a different potential career path for his future (coin for banker/businessman, etc). This is quite likely a superior system to the school guidance counselors we so foolishly trust our fate to in the US.

The air pollution in Seoul was far worse than I had ever seen during my years in Chicago (my maximum pollution experience prior to Seoul), and I didn't dare go running for fear of damaging my lungs further as Chicago had done. I would wake up and look out the window of my five star hotel room and feel compelled to hold my breath for the duration of the visit. The city has huge networks of identical high rise (50-60 story) apartment buildings built of bare concrete, the only distinguishing factor being a giant painted number near the top of each building (e.g. 106). That's right, there were hundreds of identical high rise buildings to house the 15 million people concentrated into Seoul. It felt like a computer generated scene from a dark, doom and gloom, futuristic movie, and it certainly made me feel like the luckiest person in the world to live in the woods at a lake outside of sparkling clean Seattle (sparkling in comparison anyway).

All in all it was a great cultural experience.