Hello from Seoul

Trisha has made a special request that I blog while on my work trip to Seoul.

I hope others of you enjoy this also.

  I have now been in Seoul, South Korea for 3 full days and am already enjoying the friendliness of the people, cleanliness of the city and ease of getting around. This is a much different experience then what I had in China, not saying that the Chinese are not friendly...it's just different. For one, the city noise is so quite since drivers do not use their horns as often and people generally talk much quieter.

  After getting in on Sunday night I have been able to sleep almost on a normal schedule, when this happens I know that the return trip in a week will hit me hard with jet-lag.

Day 1:



Making Tammy, our QA Manger, pose with me in front of the Korean liaison office.

    It just happened to work out that the QA director and manager were in town to work with the Korea LO and the garment factory that I was here to visit.I joined the QA team for the day. Half of the day was spent in the office and the other half at the Factory headquarters. This was also the first day that I got to meet face to face with my Korean counterparts that I work with daily so that was very special to me. It is also nice to know more about the people you work with, even when most of your conversations are via email these days.

   For all you non hip people, sorry dad but I will call you out here. There is a HUGE korean-pop song that has made it big in The States. The artists name is Psy and his song is Gangnum Style (click this link to watch the video). Gangnum is a very affluent area in Seoul and Psy's song is making fun of the people that live there. Everyone that we meet has asked us if we are familiar with the song and every store/restaurant that we walk into has the song on repeat.



My first evening experience in Seoul:

Crazy Hyundai building

Streets of Seoul

Japanese Nabe (not the best by far)

   The first night it was just me and my designer walking around and we were on our own for dinner. We walked past so many restaurants looking for a menu with pictures that we felt comfortable choosing from. The problem was that since it was my fist time in Korea and I don't have too much experience with eating traditional Korean food I was uncertain how to eat some of the food that we were seeing. In the end we found a Japanese Izakaya to eat at. Ordering was pretty safe.

 Above left, a fried chicken dish with sweet mustard...didn't seem very Japanese. Above right, the Izakaya.

On the walk how we saw lots of these cards with scantily clad

women on them and phone #s to call for a good time.

Then we stopped at the Bongeunsa Buddhist Temple, one of 2 in the city limits. In order to enter into the temple you had to walk through the Gate of Truth that was watched over by 2 sets of Guardians seen above.

The ceiling is covered in paper lanterns.

 Finally it was getting late and I was actually getting tired so we made our way back to the hotel. The last cool thing we saw was an air pump that was permanently set up in the biking park area. How handy and awesome is that. I think Portland needs these!!

The cool airpumps, free to use.