So yesterday was Christmas! It certainly didn’t feel like it. I can’t complain though, I chose to be here as long as I could. I actually come back to Canada on a Sunday night and my classes begin on that Tuesday. I made sure my time here was maxed out. When’s the next time I’m going to be able to come to Korea for 4 months, right?

So here’s a breakdown of my Christmas Day:

• ·         woke up at 11:00am
• ·         tried to use the computer but realised my internet had been disconnected
• ·         ate some cereal
• ·         had a nap
• ·         watched the Sopranos while eating tangerines
• ·         had another nap
• ·         ate some more cereal and a sandwich
• ·         took a shower
• ·         went to bed by 1:00am

It was a pretty ordinary day indeed.

I was invited to go to Seoul with one of the ESL teachers but decided against it. I wasn’t really in the mood for travelling anywhere, even though it’s only about a 45 minute trip. Going to Seoul usually means late nights and substance abuse. Not something I wanted to take part in on this oh-holiest of days.

So like I mentioned above my internet has been disconnected. I’m not sure why. I was assured when I moved in that it would work until I went back to Canada. So my only connection to the outside world is through internet at the school. The school is empty with only grad students remaining, forced to keep working while their Professors left for winter-break. My building is also vacant with myself being the only one left living there. That’s also a little bit sad, no more students running around all night screaming and pounding on the walls. I’m not sure how I’m going to be able sleep. The whole area is like a ghost town, only a few of the restaurants and convenient stores remain open. I was worried that everything was going to shut down and I’d have to hunt the mountains for squirrels to eat for the last two weeks.

I don’t know what else to say, not a whole lot has happened. I went to Seoul again last weekend but I won’t get into that in any great detail. That’s about it. The last week and a half feels like me just waiting it out. Other than going out next week for New Years Eve I don’t have too much planned, just sitting around my apartment with no internet. Yay. A few of the students suggested I just stay at the school the whole time and only go to my apartment to shower and then come back. I may actually do that, there’s always someone here in one office or another.

I don’t have too many pics for this week either. I was at a Christmas party last Friday that the ESL teachers held. I have a group shot of that – but I’m not in it.

Well, next week is my last entry so I hope I have something more to say!!!!

This week I’ve been in the Image Processing lab. They work on processing images from different types of inputs (spectral cameras, IR cameras and even webcams) and then run algorithms on them that they’ve written to extract information from the images. A few applications of the work they do would be face recognition in cameras or automatically finding defects in LCD panels that would be invisible to the naked eye.

The students in here have to be the most lively that I’ve met so far, also the most dedicated. Some days I’ve arrived at 9:00am and didn’t go home until 1:00am. By “some days” I actually mean “most days”. Not all of it has been working though, they spend a good chunk of the day goofing off.

In Korean culture status, or age, is very important. When talking to someone you always identify someone by asking them their age. This tells you how you should address them. In English it would be like calling someone “Older Brother Ryan”, “Younger Brother Ryan”, or just plain old “Ryan Brother”. This is what I’ve come to be known by, “Ryan Brother”. Or when you really get to know someone and become friends an “ah” sound is added to the end of your name, “Ryanah”.

They’ve been great to me, they take me around the school and introduce me to all their other friends that don’t work in the same lab. When you meet new Korean people the first question you usually get asked is, “Do you like kimchee?” followed by, “Have you been to Seoul?” Yes and Yes.

Speaking of Seoul, I went last weekend for a night. I’m always amazed that when you get a hotel room it’s a simple cash transaction, no questions asked. The room I stayed in was 50,000 Korean Won which is about equivalent to $45.00 Canadian. Cheap, cheap, cheap! What really blows me away is that for this price you would expect to be staying in a dump. Not in Korea, my room was huge! Complete with a 52” plasma screen, computer with internet access, queen bed and sitting area with a couch. I mean, if I wanted to I could have left in the middle of the night with the plasma – and I did think about it. Except that by the time I got back to the hotel room from our night out it was close to 6:00am. Our night out will have to be saved for another blog that won’t be posted on the Niagara Research site.  : )

Needless to say, I had a great time and will be going back this weekend. One of the English teachers who I’ve been hanging around with is leaving on Sunday to go back to the United States for holidays. So we decided to go out one last time as a goodbye party.

Another thing I’ve learned recently is the lavish life style that the English teachers at Hoseo live. Unlike schools in Canada, Korean Universities get 2 months off between each term. So they teach from September – late December and then again from March – late June. Not to mention they get about 2 weeks off in the middle of EACH term. This adds up to a total of about 5 months paid vacation each year! If they live on campus in the International Faculty Building they get a fairly decent sized apartment for free. Nice right? Here’s the best part, their “full-time” work week is 14 hours!!!  They get paid overtime after 16 hours a week!! Now I know why a few of them have come out here to work for 1 or 2 years after college and have never returned. How can you go back to a 40 hour a week job that you hate after living like this?? They also said they don’t get hassled by University administration at all. They pretty much get their class lists at the beginning of each term and then hand in their grades at the end.

So this week being the last week of exams at the University means my last two weeks here will be fairly quiet ones. A lot of the English teachers are either going home for the holidays or taking off to some warm beach somewhere like Thailand or Cambodia. I was thinking about going down to Thailand for a week with one of them, but I have to make sure I can pay tuition first!

The only students that will be at the school over the break will be the masters and PhD students. These are the students I’m with in the labs anyways, so I’ll have company.

Tonight the English teachers are having a Christmas Party (and yes, they call it a CHRISTMAS party) with a small 10 dollar gift exchange. So it should be fun. It doesn’t really feel like Christmas around here at all, there are a few lights hanging here and there but that’s about it. So it should be a good time.

One last thing I wanted to mention. I was talking to a friend of mine that also works for Niagara Research named Louise and he said how his Mom reads my blogs every week. So I wanted to say thank you to Ms. Garcia, thanks for reading!!

The weather's been quite erratic in the last week. On the weekend we had more snow with the temperature dipping to about -5 Celsius but as I'm writing this it's a mild 12 degrees. All the snow has gone and it's spring jacket weather once again. Not that I'm complaining, if it stays like this the rest of the time I'm here I'll be happy. As of today, I have 26 days left.

I was talking to a friend at home last night about New Years plans this year and how he wants to travel somewhere but couldn't get a few other guys on board. So I suggested he come out here for a week. Hopefully he's able to pull it off, if he's able to find a cheap enough flight he said he would for sure come. Fingers crossed.

As for the rest of the week it was the same old. Sitting around the office during the days sometimes until 10:30pm, reading text books on display technologies then coming home to try to coordinate an effort on a report that has to be written with a colleague from home. The problem is he gets to work at 8:30am, for me that's 10:30pm and by that time I'm starting to wind down and I'm not really in a working mood anymore.

In mountain climbing news, we went on Sunday in the bitter cold all dressed up in our winter gear. We made it about half way up and decided it was too cold and slippery to continue so we found a trail that went down the opposite side of the mountain. We went that way to explore a little bit. We wondered into a clearing where we found what looked like small homes centered on a small village square. There were no people around so I'm not sure who lived there, or IF anyone even lived there. I think it might have been a retreat village where monks go to meditate or something. That's the feeling I got, especially considering after we walked up 30 or so stairs leading away from the buildings there was a giant stone with a huge Buddha carving in it.

Under the carving there was a hole in the rock large enough that if you crawled you could fit in. I wanted to check it out because there was light coming from inside. After crawling through this small opening it opened up to a fairly large cave. The light was from candles that were burning along the perimeter of the walls. There were bamboo mats on top of foam rubber covering the floor, we took this as, "take your shoes off please." So we did and went in. On the back wall there was a tiny staircase that you could squeeze into that went up to a second level - I think it was a natural formation in the cave. At the top was a small 10 foot long by 3 foot wide room. Again, candles lined the room and there were carvings of smaller Buddha's in the walls. There was also a box of incense, a lighter and a box for donations. I just kept thinking how cool this place would have been when I was 10 years old as a fort.

We sat there while I struggled to take some pictures in the low light then left and went home. It was starting to storm and was too cold to stay outside any longer.

I'm writing this entry in a new lab that I started in today. So I'm meeting a whole bunch of new people. I seem to be causing quite a stir, they all seem very happy to have met me. It's usually the case when I meet new people here. First their mouths drop open, and then they give me their best, "HELLO!”.They start busting out their best English catch phrases and telling me their English names. It goes on for a little while and then the excitement finally dies down.

As I've been sitting here watching this the comparison has finally hit me, Mary had a little lamb. This sums up exactly how I've felt most of the time I've been here.

"It made the children laugh and play to see a foreigner at school."

I also have a fleece as white as snow.

Last week I had the awesome opportunity to go to Beijing for a few days. I went with Dr. Kim and one of his PhD students to attend another conference.

I started out on an early morning bus ride to Incheon Airport. I had to be on the bus at 4:00am to get to the airport for a 9:15 flight. After a two hour plane ride we landed in Beijing. Our trip was booked through a tour group so we were picked up at the airport by a bus along with some other Korean business men that were on our flight.

Our first stop was the conference which was about a 20 minute ride from airport. This conference didn’t have any seminars for us to attend, it was just a few large exhibition floors. First on our list was the green energy exhibition. Dr. Kim is interested in expanding the research at Hoseo University from display technology to solar cell research as well. We wondered around the floor for a while. It wasn’t so much an exchange of ideas/technology type of thing, it was vendors looking to get exposure on the products they had to offer.

After the green energy exhibits we went onto to the photonics floor, from there we went into the sensor technology area. I saw a system that does pretty much what my project set out to do, but for solar cells. It’s a very large platform that you place solar cells at one end and after going through various stages they come out cut and cleaned at the other. Also of interest was a portable spectroscopy machine that was about $20,000.00.

The conference had a security team and checkpoints that were comparable to most airports I’ve been through recently. Complete with walk-through metal detectors and x-ray machines for your bags. I’m not sure why, I couldn’t see anyone wanting to do any harm at a technology conference. Dr. Kim said the security wasn’t the military or the police although you could have mistaken them for either based on what they were wearing. He explained that because the country is communist it’s very important that everyone has a job, no matter how insignificant it may be. Otherwise the people may decide that communism isn’t as great as the government has made it out to be. This also explained the army of elderly women wondering the sidewalks sweeping up leaves. They had the same sized dust pans as you would have in your kitchen and a small broom, they would sweep 4 or 5 leaves at a time, walk over to a garbage can, dump them and then do it all again – at a VERY slow pace.

After 5 hours of the conference we got back on the bus. I was thinking we were heading to the hotel, but in fact we were on our way to a Chinese circus type show. It was an acrobatics show put on by children aged 12 to about 16 that were bending in ways I thought was humanly impossible. One girl was laying flat on her stomach and brought her feet up so far that she was basically standing on her own head while lying down. Her spine should have snapped.

There was a short intermission between acts so I asked Dr. Kim if these kids were in the Olympics or something. He laughed and said that the company that produces the show bought these kids. They were orphans so they get trained for the show, they also make them drink vinegar so their bones are basically like rubber and able to bend in ways they shouldn’t normally bend. It was very sad. After the show these ‘vinegar kids’ were standing in the lobby screaming, “D V D”, selling copies of the show. So basically they were slaves.

We headed to dinner before going to the hotel where I tried some Peking duck and a few shots of what’s called “gasoline” in other countries.

The next day the same tour bus picked us up in the morning for a day long tour of some of the sites. The first stop was Tiananmen Square which was just basically a very large city square with buildings surrounding it. There was no one stopping any tanks on this particular day. The group stopped to listen to the tour guide for a few minutes (who spoke in Korean only), so I wondered around a bit and took some pictures.

The next place we visited was The Forbidden City which is right beside Tiananmen Square. Wikipedia says that the Forbidden City was, “the Chinese imperial palace from the mid-Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. For almost five centuries, it served as the home of the Emperor and his household, as well as the ceremonial and political centre of Chinese government. Built from 1406 to 1420, the complex consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms and covers 720,000 square metres.”

I would have known that already if I understood Korean. I guess basically it’s where the rich guys lived. The place was enormous but because of time restrictions we didn’t get to tour everything. We sort of stayed in the center and went from the front to the back and then exited. I got a lot of pictures though.

After leaving the forbiddenist of all cities we got back on the bus and headed for lunch. After lunch we drove about an hour out of the city and ended up at the Great Wall. When we were getting closer to it we got into very mountainous terrain, the scenery was gorgeous, it also helped that it was a perfect day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the temperature was about 12 C. As we were driving through mountain tunnels and seeing the Wall across from us winding its way up and over enormous mountains I got a lump in my throat and goose bumps over my whole body. I don’t know if it was a combination of the music I was listening to on my iPod while looking at this beautiful scene unfold in front of me or what, but there was an overwhelming feeling of gratitude and happiness for the opportunity to witness all of this, something that I probably would never have seen in my whole life. I was quite moved by it all.

We got to an area where we took a cable car up to the top of the Wall and walked around. We made it to a spot which was the highest point of the Wall in the visible distance. I can’t even describe it. Look at the pictures...

We made it back to the hotel for dinner pretty late and I hit the bed right after. I was exhausted from walking around all day. The next morning it was time to go “home”. I packed up and enjoyed another 2 hour plane ride back to Korea. 

Although I was only there for 3 days it felt like a week. I can’t even begin to express my gratitude for being able to experience this. Thank you.