Another Smokey the Crab sighting

This a fence around an electrical transformer at the bottom of the mountain we climbed Saturday.  I plan to blog all night tonight to get caught up, because tomorrow we leave and it is hard to blog about a place when you are not there.

Only you can prevent forest fires

All around Taean are these banners with this crab holding a banner.  The characters under the crab say Taean (the first two syllables) something (maybe "gun" but  I am not certain) and I think the crab is the symbol of this part of Korea.  Taean is kind of the county seat.

Well I finally asked one of the guys at the range what the crab's banner says.  He told me it is a message telling people to prevent fire in the mountains.  I asked him why a crab, since in the US if it was in a forest (or the mountains, like these banners) we would use Smokey the Bear to deliver the message.  He just laughed.

Routine

Friday (and Thursday) of last week and Monday of this week were pretty routine.  We did this last time, too, but this time the engineer who has been here nearly continuously since February had everything almost done, so just a few days here and we can be done.

The routine is that we get up too early, to hit the emails that happen during everyone else's previous day.  Coffee in the hotel room (instant with a ton of creamer and sugar, I think I posted about this before), then about 1/2 hour before we need to be at the range we hit the little bakery in the bus station.  They have an espresso machine and can make Cafe Americano (what we Americans want when we say coffee) as well as espresso, capuchino and lattes.  It turns  out the Korean words for those drinks are just the english phonetic of those words rendered in Hangul.  I need to do a post on Koringrish.

Up the hill, surrender passport, get to work for 5 or so hours and then go to lunch.  This trip (like last) most of the lunches were at the Korean Chinese restaurant in Anheung Harbor.  I think I have a post on that restaurant in the older section.  Black bean noodles and pork mandu (essentially pork fried wontons, but better, you dip them in your own mix of soy, vinegar and dried Korean red pepper).

Back up the hill and work another 5 to 6 hours.  Put up with the stares of the workers as the clock heads for 6 PM and they have to stay to "escort" us until we are done for the day.

Drop all the stuff at the hotel.  Send out status and question emails and walk to dinner.  Dinner was a variety of restaurants, most of which I did not take any pictures of.  This trip, various kinds of hot marinated pork belly, smoked duck, garlic chicken and cutlets.  Not much rice.

Emails from home start again.  Call home in early morning their time and chat.  Odd because you are just ending your day and they are just starting.  Cut off email at 9 PM (or go insane).  Rad and go to bed.  Rarely blog.

Wednesday Morning

Getting out of time synch here, but I've got about 45 minutes to blog before I saddle up and head out.  It is "Children's Day" in Korea and we have been kicked off the range.  So yesterday was a mad dash to finish up and Thursday is a mission and Friday is the plane home.

Celebration banquet or why do you always eat Chinese food when you are in Korea?

Whenever we do an installation in Korea we host a celebration dinner at the end to celebrate our joint Korean-American success.  This year we had to do it on my second night in Taean because the big boss would be gone at the time we actually finished acceptance testing.  So here is what we had (compare and contrast to last year and I'll try to keep the courses in order.  Oh, and this year I was not the target.

Kevin and Matt, two of my engineers at the table before all the Koreans arrive.  As the night happened, Matt was sort of the target but the night was relatively somber because of the nationwide morning for the sailors on the Cheonan (google it).  I say relatively somber, because one of the Koreans did threaten to kiss him at one point.  Back to the meal.

First course, Jellyfish in the center, prawn with a sweet sauce at bottom, duck with a tangy sause on right, not really sure what on left (it had a ketchupy tasting sauce and was somewhat firm to the tooth, but no idea what it was, it did not scream fish OR fowl, but was probably one or the other) and "Thousand Year Old" egg at top.  All good (didn't eat the parsley).

Seond course, seafood and mushrooms in a shark fin sauce. Also good.  To drink there is the soju shot glass (don't drink to the bottom if you don't want it refilled) on right and Jasmine-like tea on left and bottle of Crown Royal in center top.

Vegetables and bean sprouts in yet another red sauce.  The long red pepper is not a bell pepper, but a korea hot pepper.  Moist towelette on right (apparently I committed a faux pas by not using it at the beginning of the meal).

Sorry for the bad photo, but this is "Red and White" Prawns.  It is just two huge fried prawns, the one on the left in a sweet white sauce, almost like gravy, and the one on the right in a spicy red sauce.  This is the first chinese food that Matthew ever cooked for the family 3 or 4 years ago.

Sweet bits of pork fried lightly and tossed in another sauce (this one the most like what Americans get in Sweet and Sour) with veggies on lettuce.  Notice the bottle of Crown is gone, now.

Vegetables cooked in a Korean spicy sauce, pretty hot.  What you do is you use your chopsticks (if you read the older parts of the blog you should be surprised that these are plastic chopsticks) to pick off a fold of the sweet bun on the left and then put some of the veggies on that, wrap it and eat it like a burrito (well a teeny-tiny burrito) it is almost completely unlike eating moo-shu.  Notice that beer has joined the soju and whiskey in the alcohol pantheon for the night.

I thought this was desert.  It was a sweet ball of fried dough thickly encrusted with sesame seeds.  That doesn't quite describe it, but it was memorably good.

It turns out we had to order a main course.  I did not understand this, even though one of my Korean friends tried to explain it (basically you get all those previous course as a set up to the main dish which you order off a menu that the waitress didn't bring and would have been in Korean anyway so everybody just go noodles, apparently at random), so I ended up with egg drop noodles which tasted just like you would imagine.

Daniel, the best english speaker of the Koreans, got the hot seafood noodles.

Matt, the pseudo-target, got his favorite dish Black Bean Noodles.  We eat this at lunch 3 or 4 times in every 2 week trip and this trip was no exception, so you can probably guess what we had for lunch that day.

And for desert we had a foamy creme thing that tasted sweet and very, very airy.

Happy Korean engineers.  Brown bottles are beer, Green bottles are soju, except for the square green one in the bottom center which is an evil Chinese Whiskey that makes you wish for the delicate flavor of Mekong.

I can't post from the range, but here are a couple of things that were holdovers from last time

Here is the range dog, called Jindo Dog.  This time we learned that that Jindo Dog is not actually a "Jindo Dog", which is a very famous, highly controlled dog in Korea from a place called Jindo Island.  On Jindo Island they protect the breed so zealously that no other dogs are allowed on the Island and you are not allowed to bring one out unless you have been previously approved.  You should check th older posts for the original pictures of this dog.

I made this image as large as I could.  This is the only photo from the Range facilities I will post.  The toilet is completely automated and makes European Bidet's seem like something out of the 16th century.  This thing does everything.  I don't think the photo is clear enough to make out the buttons, but by trial and error I found I can increase the temperature of the seat warmer (it's not warm just becuase someone else just got up, it is warm on purpose!), cause at least 3 different types of water jets to go off and get blow dried!  I don't know how these guys ever go back to their desks. I'm just glad they have radars to track if I happended to launch anything toward China.

No dried fish this time

Since it is spring, the kimchee is different, there is a different pickled root among the plates you are always served with your dinner, and it still smells the same.  Well a few things are very different.

The cherry trees are blooming.  This is at the entrance to the range where I am working.  I can't take pictures in the range itself, but this is near the top of the mountain.  More Cherry tree pictures to come.

Back to the Tema Motel

Same Motel as in October of 2007 (has it really been that long?), even the same room.  These are new pictures, not recycled one.  Here is my home until May 5th.

Same Pink Towel (no hairs this time) as last time.  I have now found out why these towels are always in the hotel bathrooms, bu I doubt I will get that posted tonight.  It took me a week in Korea to find out.  But I will continue to post in (roughly) chronological order.

Same beautiful bed with no bedside lamp.  Who reads in hotel rooms in Korea?

Same basket of grooming products.  Bet you can already guess what is hiding in the corner.

In case you couldn't guess.  At least this time there wewre none missing from the pack and none is the bedside trash (under the nightstand).

New Picture from re-visiting a previous spot

I wrote about a visit to the resort, which is what they call a huge rest area  Ocean Park Resort on the highway from Seoul to Taean in a previous post, here.  Well, we stop there every time we go by it, in either direction.  It is huge as I say in the previous post and is a good place to watch people.  And the grilled corn is great.  I guess it is really roasted, not grilled, here's how it is cooked (right in front of your eyes).

The lady running the establishment, which is in sort of a food court running down the middle of the resort, takes out a previously shucked corn, and puts the holding stick in it and then thrusts into this little hut of fire jets that roar out on three sides while she holds the corn in there and rotates it.  I guess the machine there is for busy times when the place is packed and you would just shove the corn onto the spikes and they would rotate into the flame channel.

This time we got there just before lunch time and it was not a big crowd, just a few busses full of school kids on a field trip.  It was strange to see some western faces, but there were chaperones and students who were "white" like us and they really stand out.  I guess we do, too.  Between dinner and the bar Thursday night (more on that in a later post) we were walking through Taean and some of the teens would shout English at us, "where are you from", "hello", etc.  They were practising English because they are all taught it in school, but don't use it all that oftern outside the classroom.

And finally, what visit to the rest area Ocean Park Resort would be complete without a mention of the plumbing?  This is one of the 5 rows of men's urinals in the bathroom on the men's side.  You can see the proper toilet stalls on the far wall.  The stalls are polished wood.  I'll probably post on the variety of toilets int heis country sometime in the future.

Arriving in Seoul and a tour of a typical South Korean Hotel Room

We left Atlanta at 1 in the afternoon (12 Noon FWB Time) and arrived in Seoul at 5 PM the next day.  Since it is late and the traffic is horrible and it is a 3 hour drive (on a good day) to Taean where we work we stay the first night in Seoul at a Hotel near Highway 1. 

These pictures are from the Hotel Oskar.  We got there about 7PM and after bouncing through Seoul Rush hour traffic we got out of the car and I got my first real smell of Korea.  Everyplace smells.  Korea has a very distinctive odor (I tried to write aroma, to be polite, but that's not right, Korea smells) which is unmistakable.  On my first trip I thought this was the smell of drying fish, but it is not because there is no drying fish during Spring, that is a fall season event.

Anyway here is a tour of some of the things you see in every Korean mid-price hotel room.

The first thing you see in a Korean Hotel room is the entryway.  This is a little anteroom, just a little bigger than the width of the door.  Slippers are for walking in the room, which is straight ahead and there is a set of plastic slippers on the left (on the cute star mat) for walking in the bathroom.  Needless to say you take your street shoes off here and put on slippers depending on which part of the hotel room you will be in next.  In Korean tradition you don't walk on the (almost always wood) floor in your socks but with slippers.  They even give you disposable slippers at the airport when you send your shoes through x-ray.

Also, in every Hotel room is a water dispensor, like this one, hot water (and it is always HOT) on the left and cold water on the right.  Instant coffee with about 99.99999999999% sugar is provided in little tubes which you can see on the tray on the bottom right of this picture.

The tray of hair care (mostly) products.  Always, brushes, combs, hairspray, hair gel, facial lotions, q-tips.  Every hotel room (well, except for the very, very expensive ones) has this basket of goodies.  Notice also the plug strip on the left.  A good hotel is one that has this and internet access (Hotel Oskar did not) and mediocre ones make you move furniture to find a plug.

And, because I knew it had to be somewhere, I found the thing every single Hotel Room in Korea has.

747 Nose Cone

Interior and exterior views of the nose cone of the Boeing 747 that Korea Airlines flew from Atlanta to Korea.  I was fortunate to be placed in the first class cabin, but I wasn't in "first class" because they only operated Coach and Business Class on this flight.  Still Business class in the First class cabin was very nice.  The seats were the "lie flat" type and unlike the first trip I slept pretty well.  Did not get any food pictures, though.
The Korean gentlemen next to me photographed all of his food, which was strange because he only ate the Korean menu items.  Also strange was the fact that there was an empty seat next to his wife, we were sitting in Row 1, but he sat next to me the whole flight.

Catching up

The pink towels are in almost all of the hotel bathrooms, they are thin, diaphonous and seem to have to real particular usefulness.  I am told that before the Olympics that this was all the towel you could ever expect in a Korean Hotel room.  Thankfully I am here post-olympics.

Welcome Facebookers

This is my Korean blog. Below you will find posts from my first trip in the fall of 2007 and above current (well, kind of current) posts for the 2010 trip.

Back to South Korea

The return of the pink towel can only mean one thing. I'm back in Korea and ready to blog on my (non-work) adventures. Watch this space for more photos and words as I return to the land of Kimchee and pink towels!

Heading for the airport

Leaving today. I have a lot left to post so I will leave this blog up for a while and update when I get over jet lag. For the next few days please ponder these and leave a comment on any post.

Range goat

why I should get a purple heart

Korean fast food

By the way, the answer to the first quiz was "empty containers of heating oil"

Range Dog

Aparently there is a range dog at every range around the world. Here is the one at the range here near Taean.


His name is "Jindo" and he is a Jindo Dog, which is the famous dog of Korea.

Ok, major update tonight (probably morning your time)

Lot of posts, clearing backlog, getting ready to head home.

What happens to all that dried fish

Well, it ends up in the back alley markets. At this stall you can have it al fresco or wrapped in plastic.

Here's more in another market stall. I don't know how you choose.

fishing fleet

Here's the fishing fleet in the little town where we come down for lunch. I am told that tides in the yellow sea are second only to the bay of fundy as far as swing and the ports have these really steep walls visible at low tide. From the radar we are installing this can really be seen over the course of a day and they are very extreme tides.I didn't ask about deep sea fishing expedition rates

Korean crab nets

...are bright green and round, at least on this coast.