More Seoul Man

Hi Everybody,

I just got back from a full day in the Itaewon market district. It was pretty interesting once I got past the occasional smell of the sewer. Lots of shops with all kinds of Korean stuff. Lots of knick knacks. I bought 2 knicks and about 17 knacks. I probably spent too much for the armload of stuff I bought, but hopefully people will like getting something from here. I'm not going to tell you all I picked up. I ran out of cash and have to figure out how to get more. The selection was not what I had hoped, however.

I know Emily wants a "Seatbelt Bag". There were TONS of handbags, but I'm not sure what to get. No one knew what I was talking about when I tried to explain the seatbelt bag thing and, to be honest with you I'm not sure myself. If I only knew what "seatbelt" was in Korean. I'm drawing pictures in the air and wrapping invisible things around my waist. The clerks must have thought I was nuts!

Some photos of shopping in Seoul (sorry they're so small):

Oh, and I ran into two clerks who were laughing at me, saying they had my picture on a tie. Then showed me a Santa Claus tie. I think I'm the only person in Korea with a beard. I wish I could find a camera store. My battery is dead in the useless Minolta I have with me and I really would like to take some pictures of the lights all over the place. The Christmas lights are truly unbelievable.

My package of parts arrived at the airport today and is at Customs, so I think it will be at Samsung on Monday, so I should be able to leave on the 6:30 flight on Monday. OK, tonight I found the Korean equivalent of Buca Di Beppo, the Italian place where the smallest serving serves 27 people. I walked down the hill from the hotel to a Chinese or Korean or Japanese (how the heck would I know) restaurant. No speak English! No speak Korean! So they had pictures of food on the menu with stick figure gibberish underneath. One looked pretty good, with porkish looking meat in the middle of some greens. OK by me.

So I order and when it's ready I pay 20,000 Won and try to leave a tip. No can leave tip. I like this place! So the waitress gives me a bag which weighs approximately 7 to 8 pounds, I'm not exaggerating. Then I trudge up the 15% grade a quarter of a mile hill thinking "I'm going to have to return the ceramic plates to the restaurant in the AM, or maybe the hotel knows to return them for me". Imagine my surprise when I get to my room and open up the bag. Now picture a plate…….no wait! Wait! Wait! Remember the last you washed the car? Picture the bottom half of the bucket. That was what I carried up the hill. A plastic bucket containing a GALLON of soup and nasty green stuff and pretty much the entire spine of a 30 pound pig!

Oh, yeah, no utensils, so I'm eating it by using my ice bucket tongs to pull the meat off the vertebrae and eat it with my fingers. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to with the 6.2 pounds of green stuff, bones and soup I have left over. By eating full time for an hour now, I have managed to lower the level of the bucket o' stuff about 1 ½ inches. Most of that was bones which are now in the plastic bag. Only 4 inches to go! I am NOT kidding!

And you won’t believe this: “My Driver“ had 3 small oranges for me when I got in the cab yesterday. I ate them all and tonight I bought 4 more from a truck outside the restaurant. I’m a changed man!

I think I'm going to stop at the downtown shuttle stop tomorrow and see if I can find a camera and record some of this to share. I guarantee you would be amazed!

Seoul Man

A glimpse into my trip to Seoul, South Korea...

So I left the hotel this morning at 8:45. Got a taxi (You have a choice of White Taxi, low budget or Black Taxi, about $10 more for my ride, the Concierge said). So I get into this brand new luxury Hundai (if you can imagine a Luxury Hundai (aren’t they, like mutually exclusive?). Pretty nice ride, but the traffic is MISERABLE!!! Holy Freakin” CRAP!!! We probably went 15 miles in about an hour and a quarter.

This, as it turns out, was not that bad. My driver (more about that in a moment) dropped me off in front of the building I was going to and called the guy I was meeting so he could meet me in the lobby. Cool.

Then we started with Security, Oh……my……Gawd….! These are the most paranoid people I have ever dealt with. To start with, I had to leave my passport with the receptionist in exchange for a badge that would let me in virtually anywhere. Not too concerned with WHERE I was going, but when it came to WHAT I was carrying it was a whole different story. I had to empty my laptop bag and tool bag so three guys could pore over the contents. Any thing that could carry data – my Blackberry, memory stick, camera, etc was sealed in individual baggies and returned to me. If I opened a bag while there, its contents would be cheerfully retained by Samsung upon my departure.

My laptop had seven pieces of security tape covering every port on the machine. Lord help me if a piece of tape was missing upon checkout (that’s another ½ hour process when leaving). They would then wipe the laptop clean of data before returning it to me. Every part I brought in was cataloged with the serial number and after replacing any part the old part’s serial number, would be entered into the security log on my way out. Even cables (can’t store a lot of data in an unplugged 12 inch long cable) had to be serialized (we made some stuff up here).

The room I was working in was on the other side of a clean room, so to get there you have to remove your shoes, put on a pair of rubber sneakers w/booty tops, put on a mask, headgear, full body suit and rubber gloves, stand 2 at a time in a airlock that blows wind at you for a minute, and then walk the 25 feet past the end of the clean room to the computer area where you can take some of this stuff off. Man those Koreans have little feet!

I replaced the parts I came to replace, then tested the scanner OK. Then as I was wrapping things up, I dropped a screw and when I reached for it, touched a fuse on a board and it fell off the board.

The solder connection was so poor that it was being held on by oxidation, not solder. As it turned out, another one did the same thing. Also, somewhere down the line, because this is a one-of-a-kind Engineering machine, either when the scanner broke or when I was working on it, the glass fiber optic cables that channel light to the microscope lens, had been run over by the moving part of the machine, which destroyed them. I had to find a soldering iron and fix the board and pull the fiber optics out of another scanner to use in this one, all of which took until 6:30.

Ok, now we’re back to My Driver. Apparently I now have a driver. I told him I would probably at Samsung until 5:00, since he asked. He gave me his card and said to let him know if I needed a ride back to the hotel. At about 6PM the phone in the room I was in rings and one of the Koreans starts talking to someone and hangs up. He tells me my driver has been waiting outside and called my contact to see when I might be ready, but says not to hurry. I get out there about 6:45 and he is there waiting for me. I must have overpaid in the AM. It took 2 hours to make the return trip to the hotel! The traffic here is worse than driving in New York City by a long shot! I’m going back tomorrow and my driver is picking me up at 10AM. Apparently he’s in it for the long haul.

Honest, that’s all for now.

NY, NY

Holy Crap! I'm sitting in the Rodeo Bar and Grill on 3rd Avenue at midnight, watching the cabs go by. I counted 26 in 60 seconds, not counting the half dozen town cars. About 15 per light cycle. Maybe 3 or 4 private vehicles per light. Cabs stop in the middle of the intersection to pick up fares. A couple stops 2 cabs in the intersection in front of a cop car, he gets in one cab, she gets in the other and the date is over I guess.
The dump I'm staying at is just a few bloicks from the Empire State Building - I can see the top of it from in front of the hotel. Now I know why I stay at Hiltons. Ever stay in a hotel where you have to step up eight inches to enter the midget bathroom? At least they put a warning sign on the door, but I doubt I'll remember at 3AM.