The Whole Shebang

I'm laying in my bed in Troy, MI. It is 1:20 Wednesday afternoon. I'm trying to think of something clever to start this blog off, after having written the rest of the piece, and editing the video... and I still can't. I could have used any of the other commonly tossed about ending phrases, or approaches, but none seemed to fit the bill. I know that the enormity of what I experienced in this last month and a half in a different country, absorbed in a different culture, and among a different people, cannot be summarized with cliché and a farewell. I just know that I'll miss that place in the middle of the hills in the western outskirts of Ulsan, and I will look back on the time I spent there, and the people I met there, with a great fondness for the rest of my life. That is all.

I'm going now. Please enjoy my last post, and thank you for reading this all along the way. I've enjoyed sharing my experiences with you, dear reader. I hope you have enjoyed reading of them.

--

First things first. Video. Here. Finally.

Happy now? Me neither. The first 2 words are supposed to be "hello there!" but for some reason YouTube snipped that off. Woops.

So first of all, allow me to indulge you on the final product of my research. I finished the program Thursday, and it was at least partially successful. If you don't want to look back to my post from a few weeks ago, I was tasked with the duty of turning 3-d voxel (and some 2-d images as well) signal intensity data from MRI machines, taken over different times (ranging from 10-200ms), and creating a slope for the intensity for each individual voxel over each of those times. Then, I was to turn the slopes for the individual voxels back into an image, and make that display in the Matlab window. It turns out that Matlab really isn't the best program for visualizing 3-d data, but I found a function on the Mathworks file exchange site, called vol3d, which allowed me to turn the slope data into an image with 3-d axes, which stacked the image slices along the z-axis instead of creating one solid figure. The final result for all of the data looked like what you see to the right. This is a decent job of data visualization, but the lack of transparency into to the inner bone region makes seeing a difference in bone and marrow with the T2 and T2* imaging difficult. The intention of this program is to take this data and visualize it, then take other data from similar projects around the world and compare our data to it. As a programming n00b, I would say that such a crash course in Matlab was a really beneficial experience; that is a software that I will be using for a very long time to come, and now I feel I can conquer pretty much any task thrown at me. I am grateful to have undertaken the project, and would definitely be interested in further research opportunities because of it.

Nothing emanates Buddhist modesty like
3 giganticgolden statues.

We left Ulsan Friday evening and arrived in Seoul at around 8:45 that night, so there wasn't a whole lot to do except walk around the Hyewha district, where our hostel was located. The next day, Labiba and I woke up damn early to head out and see something in Seoul before I had to head to the airport for my 5:30 flight. Using the subway, we went to Insa-dong, which is a region known for the shops with traditional Korean gifts and food. We got there really early, so there wasn't a lot open while we were there, but we did find a couple open shops and looked around there for gifts to bring back home. Then, around 9:30 or so, we migrated north to Seoul's largest Buddhist temple, called Jogyesa. We arrived just prior to morning service, so there were many buddhist believers who had entered the temple to pray and prepare. The temple itself was a marvelous sight to behold. On the outside, the walls are painted with story-telling murals that wind around the structure, and the top is decorated in the traditional green and red paint that I saw first at the Gwon residence my first weekend here. Inside it was even more incredible. In the front, there were 3 giant golden statues of Buddha, and on the walls on either side, there were many lit candles. There were lamps that hung on strings towards the ceiling, and an altar in the middle of the building, towards which many older folks were praying. Some of them did a routine where they stand up, get in a praying position (hands flat together underneath chin, head down) then squat back down to make the same pose, and repeat the process, which, honestly, was kind of fun to watch.

"'sup?"

From Jogyesa we went to the Gyeongbokgung Palace, which is South Korea's largest palace, and former home to the emperors of the Joseon dynasty. It was built originally in the 1200s, but was destroyed by a Japanese invasion in the late 1600s. Shortly after that, the palace was rebuilt and restored, and remains a national treasure to this day. There were many visitors the day we went, and it was very hot out, but we still were able to roam freely about the palace grounds and see various structures and have fun guesses at their roles. For example, a shrine in the middle of a man-made lake.. it denied access to visitors (by means of a 2-ft tall wooden fencing and a tiny little sign), which only made me more curious. My guess was it was a place for meditation and prayer, but I never found out if I was right... I guess I'll never know. There was a lot of really impressive architecture about the place, and a very nice grounds area with many trees and a few other manmade ponds. We stayed there until 11:30 or so, then headed back to Hyewha, where I had my last legitimately Korean meal for the foreseeable future: a large helping of Tonkatsu, which is a fried pork patty with some special dark sauce. From there, we went back to the hostel,  where I gathered my belongings and then headed out, to Incheon International Airport, where my ride home was waiting.

Throne room of Gyeongbukgung

For my retrospective post, I've decided to break it up into simple chunks. There are several things that I will miss about living in a different country... other things, however, I will certainly not miss. We'll start out with those, and finish up on a high note.

Things I Will NOT Miss

• Sleeping on those awful mattresses. Koreans like really firm mattresses. In fact, many Koreans don't even use mattresses at all, they just lie a mat down on the floor. I guess it makes sense, then, that the mattresses in the UNIST dormitory were about 3 inches thick and gave practically no give at all. As a result, I had major sleeping problems the entire tripo; it took me forever to fall asleep in the first place on those things, and then when I did (in the early morning hours), I couldn't wake up any earlier than 11. My back would be in pain for an hour or two after waking up, without fail. I know that firm mattresses help your back, but if you're used to sleeping on your side, then doing so on a hard surface kinda hurts. That is first on my list.

• K-Pop. I don't think I'll ever get these awful songs out of my head for the rest of my life. Everywhere you went in any city in Korea, shops, restaurants, grocery stores, department stores, and even some bars, would play K-pop. And every time I passed by something playing K-pop, it was always one of maybe six songs that were getting constant airplay, and were all very poppy and catchy, and they all made me feel like throwing up. I'm not going to link you to a K-pop song because I don't think you deserve such cruel punishment.

• Drinking Soju (and other bad alcohol). If you want to get drunk in Korea, you drink Soju. I'm not quite sure what it is made from, but the alcohol content is about 20%, and it tastes exactly like watered down vodka, or worse, rubbing alcohol. And you drink it straight! It is served cold, which kinda helps a little bit, but when you start taking shots of the stuff, it becomes intolerable before you can really get drunk. That, and the horrible beer selection that they have here I will not miss. Max, Cass, and Hite are the big beer brands of Korea, and they all taste like Natty or Genny Light (i.e. cold piss). The only saving grace of both of these types of alcohol was that you could mix them together, a drink called somekchi, and the result was a little more alcoholic and not quite as taste-raping. But still not good.

Bittersweet

• UNIST campus. The campus at UNIST, as I hope my cinematography displays, is pristine. Only three years old, the buildings are all brand new, and it is a very clean area. The surroundings are very pretty hills, and I got a chance a couple weeks ago to walk through the natural landscape in search of a lake. The facilities and buildings are also quite nice, and the dorms were alright too. If it weren't so damned far away from everything, I might have put this solidly in the "will miss" category. But the fact remains that it is a 10-minute bus ride into the nearest city-like area of Ulsan, and 30+ minutes to any of the major attractions in the city. At least the bus system was easy.

• Ulsan. Ulsan city is a big city, and there are many great restaurants, cultural sites, and museums that we went to and enjoyed. The problem is, Ulsan is a big city in terms of land-mass, so without an escort, finding your way around is damn near impossible. The bus system is excellent, but even if we had found a full bus map, we wouldn't have been able to read it. The food in Ulsan is superb; fantastic seafood, delicious bulgogi, and many delicious barbecue places. However, there is limited shopping and nightlife around the city, and relatively few tourist attractions in close range of that. Ulsan is a business-driven city with many fine points to it, but is not the best town for tourists or sightseers.

• Culture. This is a really, really broad thing to try and describe. I will miss the family-style attitude and focus on doing things together, and making sure nobody gets left out of the group. I will also miss how relatively little money mattered, as it seemed a lot of the friends I made were more than willing to just pay for peoples drinks or food or what-have-you. I won't miss how unwilling people are to take calculated risks; nobody walks across the street unless the light is green, nobody wants to go on impromptu swims or hikes, and nobody wants to do or wear or eat things that go against the grain. Also, I dislike very much the inherently segregated dorm system that is in all Korean colleges. Girls are not allowed in the same building as guys, let alone the same room. It wasn't so bad in the summer, but in the wintertime, if you want to hang out with a group of guys and girls, you have to go outside or to a different building. This is an unnecessary and obnoxious cultural hinderance that really got under my skin for the short time I was there.

Things I Will Miss... A Lot

• Being able to drink legally. Only... 8 more months until I'm 21. *sigh*

• Ultimate Frisbee. While I can play ultimate in the U.S., and do play on occasion, I have never played with the frequency (or intensity) with which I played with the UNISTars. Clayton, GaRam, and I (but mostly Clayton) pioneered the sport at UNIST, and by the time the few weeks were up, it had become something that we did regularly. All of the UNISTars were vastly improved from week 1 to the final week. [Rao and Smart tie for most improved, if you want to make me award it]. From 3-on-3 to 7-on-7, we would always have a spirited game and it would always be fun (and I would always be soaked in sweat afterwards... stupid humidity). 

• Research. Despite my total newbage when entering the lab for the first time, I was able to complete an entire project. Granted, any EECS major probably could have figured out how to do my task in like 2 days, but still... This made me consider grad school a lot harder than I was previously, and I definitely want to do research again before I graduate. I dare say that I ight even have gained an affinity for Matlab, which, given my attitude about coding before this project, is a huge turnaround. I enjoyed it that much, and I hope to continue it in the future.

• Food. Oh my god the food. I love Korean food to death, and I have been spoiled by having it fro every other meal. From the chicken, beef, and pork, to the barbecue, the seafood, the kimbap... hell, even the snacks that I bought at the 7-11 was really good. I had more variations on ramen than I had ever dreamt possible: jajang ramen, spaghetti ramen, squid ramen, kimchi ramen. Oh, and did I mention how much I love kimchi? I LOVE kimchi. Seriously, I can't get enough of it. Whether it is in ramen, in rice, grille, cold, something about that spiced fermented cabbage makes me fall in love. The ingredients they use in many of their dishes also appeal to me, especially garlic. It is frequently cooked into food, but at barbecue places, garlic comes in a plate with a red sauce that cuts its intensity. We often roasted our garlic off to the side of the meat, then dipped a piece of that and a piece of meat into the red sauce (except sometimes I skipped the meat..). Koreans also make liberal use of the chili pepper, which is just fine with me. In fact, many of the Koreans I ate with were surprised and impressed by how much I liked spicy food; on some occasions, I could handle it better than the locals! I never met a meal I didn't like during my time here, and it was, hands down, my favorite part of the experience.

• People. I will greatly miss all of the friends that I met at UNIST. In no particular order, I give shout-outs to our Korean teacher (who we simply called "sunsaeng-nim," which is Korean for teacher), who taught us a fair bit of Korean in only two weeks, and took us out to get coffee and all sorts of awesome stuff. I'll miss the UNIST faculty, including our program director SoJin Choi, Professor Kwon (head of language center), and Mr. Lee, David, Professor Choi, and Professor Tatar, who work/teach in the language department and facilitated our early language course and cultural experiences. I'll miss Professor Cho and all of my labmates, Sohyun, Franklin, Cheong, Min Ah, Seul Kee, and the the time I spent in front of that computer. Finally, and more than anything, I will miss the great student friends that I met at UNIST, and all of the time we spent together with them hanging out, going out to eat, or going on some adventure within Ulsan or elsewhere in the country. I'll miss SeongWoo and MinYung (mine and Labiba's homestay people), Eun Kwang (roommate!), Smart, Rao, Abi, Jolly, Fawad, Minhaj, Ahmed, Raja, Arif, Marian, Alicia, Jae Sung, Harmony, Melissa, John, Walter, Boris... did I miss anyone? Oh, yeah, that's right–I miss all of you. Thank you all for making my trip nothing short of spectacular.

I guess that's it for me, then. It has been fun, but now it is done. I thank you all for reading and keeping up with me, and especially sitting through these long, verbose posts that I'm prone to write. I've had a lot of fun writing about the trip. I wish you all a warm and heartfelt goodbye.

Like a Roll of Toilet Paper...

For a very long time, Montana Tech football had a coach named Bob Green. He sadly announced his retirement after the conclusion of the 2010 season, but for 24 years, he was the face of the Frontier league. Why should you care about Montana Tech football, you ask? Well, to be honest, unless you live in Montana, or are one of their opponents, you probably shouldn't. Normally, nobody would pay attention to such a random school in the middle of nowhere, but Bob Green gained the attention of major sportscasters and journalists from all over the country, not for his successes on the football field, but for his enthusiasm and words of... er... wisdom. They're called "Greenisms," and I'm going to steal one here: like a roll of toilet paper, the closer I get to the end of this trip, the faster it is going.

Since these updates have been admittedly irregular, I have quite a bit to talk about. The first week of the program, the USURFour and our program director, Choi So Jin, went to the Hyundai Heavy Industry (HHI) plant and took a tour. The first part of the tour was your typical walk-through-a-museum-and-listen-to-the-tour-guide-talk-style tour. We learned about Chung Ju-Yung, the founder of Hyundai, though when we were taken around the tour guide consistently referred to him as Asan, which was his pen name. Matter of fact, most of his employees would refer to him as Asan, and in 2009, Asan memorial hall was erected to commemorate the accomplishments of the man and the company he built. The exhibits on display put forward Hyundai's accomplishments in all of their different areas of business, as well as items from Asan's personal life. They had everything from his old family photos, to his shoes and wardrobe, to a full-sized re-creation of his office space, which he had maintained the exact same for all 30some years of being president. From what I gathered, they really liked this guy.

A ship. If you didn't guess that.

Goliath cranes: only defeated by a pebble-sized rock
hitting them on the head.

After that, we went on a brief car tour of the ship-building yard. Cameras weren't allowed... but since I had a flip cam and was in the very back seat, I was able to subtly take a video of the side view as we were driving. The angle wasn't the best, but they're illegal, so obviously the quality will suffer a little bit. The yard was impressive to say the least. Ulsan produces about 20% of the whole entire nation's GDP, and the majority of that is the Hyundai company, with this shipyard and the auto plants elsewhere in the city. The space itself is 1500 acres, and half of that is devoted to building ships. There are many depressions all around the yard dry docks, and they are partially submerged, but enclosed, so that the builders can build the ship in the dock when there's no water, then lower the gate and test it's buoyancy. They also had these gigantic cranes, appropriately called Goliath cranes, that stood about 20 stories tall and had a maximum weight capacity of 1200 tons, more than 1,000,000kg. My favorite sight (which I wasn't able to capture because it was on side of the car opposite my my covert camera) was seeing somebody operate that crane. Picture if you will a tiny little man in a tiny little cage on top of a 300 foot tall leviathan moving a gigantic metal shipping crate. Made my day.

Translation: In case of return from death as evil
demon spirit, place animal sacrifice here.

That weekend, one of the grad students here for the summer, John (from Canada), decided to try and find a lake that is just north of our campus. If you recall, I've told you before that the UNIST campus is close to pretty much absolutely nothing, so finding this lake was quite an adventure. There are a couple of walking paths that lead to different places within the University, but none that directly lead to this lake, so we did some minimal bushwhacking, but for the most part followed natural paths around the hilly mountains. We took one of the UNIST paths until we found what looked to be an ATV trail (there were tire tracks), then followed that up the hill, and did our best to keep going north. Along our way, there were several gravesites that were dug in the side of the hill in grassy clearings. I don't know who they were for or why there were in the middle of nowhere in the hills, but I took pictures of them. We got as far as we could along the way, but finding a good path proved very difficult, and we had to backtrack several times when the incline became too steep or the foliage became too thick to whack through. We were within sight of the lake, but it was just too far down at too steep an angle to traverse, and eventually, we abandoned the mission for fear of losing our daylight. Still, it was a valiant effort and a good 4-hour hike, and a chance to say that I went on some high adventure while out on the Korean woods.

So... what else have we done? Last weekend several of us went to Haeundae beach in Busan. Busan is the second-largest city in Korea, which is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and it was a pretty nice day outside and it was a weekend. I guess it should come as no surprise, then, that the beach was totally packed. Before the beach we had gone to a fish restaurant just down the road and gotten a couple of baked fish things (whose names evade me) and a gigantic pot of soup with practically every type of seafood of Korea. There were mussels, clams, crabs, an octopus, squid, and what I'm pretty sure was a hermit crab. I was the only one who was daring enough to eat it, and though it was more rubbery and meaty than a typical shellfish, it tasted pretty much the same as a clam or mussel. It was a good lunch, filled me up decently, and fortunately, it stayed down.

Imagine this, except with double the number
of annoying floaty tube things.

The beach was much, much different than any of the beaches I've ever been to in the USA. More than half of the people in the water were in big inflatable tubes that were available for purchase, and the people in those tubes seemed to be aqua-averse. I saw one girl who almost panicked when she almost lost her position in the tube. The beach police were also not allowing anybody past a certain line, marked by buoys, which was only neck-deep at best. This, combined with the huge beach-going population, created a logjam in the water pretty much where ever you went. The waves weren't particularly high, but more than once I was unintentionally rammed by a person in a tube, or just a person, riding the wave. On the sandy part, there were hundreds of umbrellas set up directly adjacent to one another in groups, with about 8 feet in between each group, and 2 groups stacked between the water and the sidewalk, all the way along the beach front. We spent about 90 minutes in the water, and a little more than that just hanging out in the sand and tossing the frisbee.

So at this point, you're probably wondering "where is that mythic video that has been promised to me since the first day he landed in Ulsan?" Quiet, you. iMovie sucks so I need to figure that out with the video clips I have, I guess I'll do that next time. Kind of ironic, is it not, that the last post will contain a tour of the campus, which is something we determined our first week here?

On the next (and last!) post, I talk about the final product of my research, a little bit of time I spend in Seoul, my flight home, and a general retrospective summary. I'm really not looking forward to this post... because that means that the trip will be over. I've really had fun over the last 6 weeks, and I'm sad to go and say goodbye to all of the friends that I've made. There are certain things that I will miss, and certain things I definitely will NOT miss... but we can talk about that when next my fingers hit the keyboard. Which will be sooner than 2 weeks from now! Promise! Ta ta for now!

Coffee&Waffle Is Always Be With You

안녕하세요! Last time you heard from me I reported (literally, reported) on my homestay visit to Bonghwa and Gyeongju, which was the first weekend I had in South Korea. It's been two weeks since that that trip, and as I'm sure you can imagine, I have quite a bit to relay. This isn't aided by the fact that I lied to you all; I told you I would post a new blog later that week, and, well, yeah... that didn't happen. Ga Ram picked up the slack, but I apologize for any of you who were anxiously refreshing the page over the last 12 days in my absence, and any of you who feel personally insulted by this unfulfilled promise (I hope this doesn't apply to any of you, really). In the future, I think 10-12 days between posts is a more realistic goal, especially with two of us bloggerfolk instead of one.

Anyways. To the updates.

The Korean class is long finished, and the research is now almost two weeks old. The first week, my professor (Cho Hyung Joon) and both of his grad students were away at different laboratory elsewhere in the country for 3 days, and I was assigned to read several papers and a half a text book on MRI technique in order to get familiarized with the material. Then, this week, I was introduced to a matlab program that was written by one of his graduate students, Sohyun, and told that I would be running that program over and over to analyze some data. Yesterday, however, I was informed that my task would be different; instead, I would be writing my own code, which is a lot more involved... a LOT more involved. 

Allow me to explain (Warning: geek speak ahead!). There are three sets of experiments (organized by the day they were performed), and each of the experiments has an image associated with it taken by an MRI machine. The image is 64x64x64 voxel data, and a transverse slice (64x64x1) looks like a multicolored circle surrounded by blue. The circle is the (trabecular) bone, and the colors vary depending on the signal the MRI received over time. The original program that Sohyun wrote took one of these slices, created a noise filter by pulling up the image and manually selecting a region outside of the bone ('create mask'), then allowed you to either select a region within the bone and create a linear fit between frequency and time data. The slope of that line is (depending on which experiment was run) T2 or T2* data, and based on that data, we can determine which region is bone and which region is empty space (the very basics of MRI are covered here, if you're interested). I told you the original project was to run this program for all the experiments, but now it's a little different. I have been assigned (as of yesterday) the task of writing a code that will take the original voxel data, and create that linear fit for each individual voxel over time, giving me either T2 or T2*. Then, with the T2 or T2* data from the individual voxels, I will reconstruct the image using a black and white color scale corresponding to the value of those data. The end result will be a 3-dimensional voxel image of the trabecular bone sample, with dark regions corresponding to bone and white regions corresponding to the empty space occupied by water (or vice versa). Essentially, I'm building my own MRI image from the ground up.

This is a really exciting prospect... except for the fact that I really have no idea what I'm doing. I am a relative n00b when it comes to matlab, all the experience I have with it is only writing basic functions to graph things or fulfill stupid Engin101 projects. I expect to spend most of my time looking on the internet for examples of how to write proper loops, and asking my grad students to help me out with a lot of it. On the other hand, when I finish the project, I will have extensive experience in matlab, and I have a feeling this will come in handy with a lot of my future coursework, as well as any further research I do. Even if I don't finish the project entirely, I will have gained a lot of valuable experience being baptized by fire, so to speak. I have two weeks to finish that which I have no idea how to start. Wish me luck.

So you're probably wondering why the title of this (already somewhat lengthy) blog post is so peculiar. Well, you can read for yourselves, here:

This is, without a doubt, the best and most epic Engrish Fail I have seen thus far in South Korea.

That came from a restaurant called (you guessed it!) Coffee and Waffle, and I visited it in Daegu when I traveled there a weekend ago. Here's that story:

The pretty garden is there to distract you from the
pain your legs feel after all of those freaking stairs.

In the morning, Seong, Labiba, and I left Ulsan to Daegu via the KTX train. At the Daegu KTX station, we met Min Young, who is Seong's lab mate and Labiba's home stay person, and her friend (whose name I sadly forgot). From there, we went to the Daegu subway system, and then on to Woobangland, which is an amusement park in the city. Daegu is a notoriously hot city, due to the topography (it is surrounded by mountains on all sides, which through the magic of meteorology traps heat), and that Saturday was no exception. We miraculously got a student discount because we had our MCards on us, and Min Young was able to flirt with (or otherwise convince) the ticket man enough to let us go, despite our obvious foreign-ness. Once inside, we went to several amusements, including a descend-and-splash type ride (very nice considering the weather), a gigantic swing with a freely attached passenger compartment (so that we could go upside down when we went the full 2π radians) but only one true roller coaster: the Camel Back. It's called such because it has a few humps towards the end of the ride. I was able to sneak the flip cam on the ride, so if you're interested in seeing what a Korean roller coaster has to offer, see below (starring Min Young's hair! .. and a lot of wind noise):

125 meters in
125 pixels or less

The most interesting thing in the whole theme park was the "Sky Drop," a 130m descent from a tower. You are strapped into a harness, jump, and the first 100m or so of your descent are entirely freefall. It isn't a bungee jump, though; they merely slow you down at the end of your fall. It sounded like something I would have easily been game, save for the pricetag: 40,000₩ (30,000 if you went in pairs). That translates to about $40 to... fall down. I decided I'd save my money for better things.

If and when you see me wearing this shirt,
I encourage you to follow the instructions.

Like t-shirts! After we left Woobangland, we went to a local restaurant and feasted upon a gigantic collective plate of chicken, noodles, and spicy sauce (the name of which again evades me), as well as a visit to Coffee&Waffle, where we had Patbingsu, a Korean dessert with ice cream, fruits, sweet beans, and ice. After that, we debated on whether or not to go to a movie, but decided instead to go to a department store called Debec, a 12-story mega-shop in the middle of downtown Daegu. The first few floors were all girly things (jewelry, shoes, women's formal and casual, etc), then there were some sports apparel and casual wear on the next few floors, and men's dress clothes and shoes were on the top few floors, with a food court on the 12th floor. While I didn't find a crazy Korean hoodie that I have sought since my arrival, I did find this awesome t-shirt, which, I think, is an accurate representation of my personality and lifestyle.

It had been a long day already, so I grabbed a coffee before we went to a bar for a little while, so we could order a cheap pitcher of beer in anticipation of our final stop for the night: the club. After a little while at the bar, we walked around the corner to a night club called Gypsy (I think). Being in American clubs, I was hoping that the music that they played in Korean clubs was a little more techno and a little less Lil' Jon, and fortunately, I got exactly that. From 12-4am, we danced to some really good local DJ talent who spun nothing but infectious electro and deep house music – and yes, we did dance until 4am. There were 4 DJ's who were on stage while I was there, but my favorite was the last one, DJ Jini, holding down the spot for the late-night ragers. By the time she was halfway through with her set, however, we were all exhausted and decided to call it a night. We stayed the night at a "jimjiljang," which is a 24-hour establishment where you can walk in, shower up, keep your belongings in a locker, and spend the night on the floor. It was nice to be able to rinse off after drenching myself in sweat, but I'm still not accustomed to the whole sleeping on the floor thing, so when we woke up at 9:30 on Sunday to head back to Ulsan, I had probably gotten a total of 3 hours in between all of the the waking up and falling back asleep I had done. I was grateful to get back to the dorm room and get some real sleep for a little while.

I could discuss more, but I won't, because I've already taken up enough time and verbiage and it's ungodly early in the morning here (I should have been in bed like 3 hours ago... whoops). On my next installment, I'll give you that long-promised walking tour of UNIST, take you through a tour of the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipbuilding yard, and report on what other adventures I'll be taking in the... 2 weeks I have left. Wow. Time's been flying. Talk to you next time!

Research has begun. So has procrastination...

Hey all~! It's been a while... and obviously that's my fault. As you can see from the title of today's post my research has officially started!... Last Monday.... Meaning I've been too lazy to give you guys an update on my life... Part of me wants to say that I've been researching 18 hours a day and so I don't have time to update the blog... but that would be a blatant lie... and I don't lie... at least not that often.


Anyways, I'll dive right into the research! I'm working under Prof. Song Myoung Hoon, or in Korean 송명훈 교수님. His research field is focused on polymer based optoelectronic devices, organic semiconductor lasers, and photonic devices using liquid crystals. I'm currently working on the polymer based optoelectronic devices; specifically with organic light emitting diodes (OLED) and solar cells. Through this past week, I've been working with the other USURF student in our lab in making some OLEDs as well as reading papers that our lab has published and other papers related to OLEDs. I'm not going to go into great detail as to what an OLED is (partly because I'm still learning the science behind them...) but basically an OLED is a light emitting device that uses organic materials as the electroluminescent layer. Different types of polymers produce a variety of different light colors when subjected to an electrical current. I'm currently working with this polymer mixture solution called 'Super Yellow' (what an awesome name!) which produces a greenish light. OLEDs are used in TV screens, computer monitors, and smaller devices such as phone or iPod screens. One of the advantages of OLEDs over LCDs is that OLEDs don't require a back-light which allows the overall device to be thinner. However, OLEDs aren't as efficient at producing light compared to regular LEDs and LCDs because it's a very new type of technology. And that's why my research is with OLEDs! Hopefully I'll be able to significantly aid my lab in their research!

I guess I should describe more about the people in my lab. There are nine people in my lab including the professor; two graduate students, two USURF students, and four undergraduate students. The other USURF student is a Korean undergraduate from... (I forget where~~~). His name is 장동주 and he's planning on entering the lab as a graduate student next year. We both work with the graduate student named 이보람. I think he's been in this lab for 2 years? I'm not sure.... (I really should pay more attention to the little details....) But yeah, the four undergraduates are working as research assistants in the lab; some of them are planning on entering the lab after they graduate. There are two juniors and two sophomores... and now I feel like I'm listing facts rather than expressing my feelings and opinions so I'll stop here with the lab description. 


Research so far is going well. Samples are being made, experiments are being run, data are being analyzed. Though I can't say my samples are producing the best results.. but that will change! Hopefully... I'm stopping here for now but there's more to come with research~! Stay tuned! (And maybe I'll actually take some pictures of my work and post them here.....)


Aside from research, last weekend I went back up to Seoul to visit my parents and brother again. This time, my brother and I went back to our old neighborhood to eat at a restaurant we both love(d) back in 2002-2004. We past both apartment complexes that we lived in while we were in Korea, our old middle school, and then we arrived at the restaurant. I felt a huge wave a nostalgia while walking from the subway station to the restaurant. Most of the memories weren't that great.. but I had my share of good memories when I lived in Korea. Below are some pictures that I took on our trek to the restaurant.

Apartment building of 2003-2004

Road leading up to apartment building of summer of 2006

Sign of middle school back in 2003-2004. "Bang-bae middle school"

한지박 restaurant! Korean style Chinese food~~

Good food is good food. Thinking of food is making me hungry right now.. so I think I'm going to end this post here and head out to find some food to fill my stomach... Hopefully next week I'll get my act together and I'll post a new post at a reasonable time~. Thanks for reading! And don't forget to read Jack's post~!

Homestay in Bonghwa and Gyeongju

Hello everyone. My apologies for not posting last week, but I think I have a pretty good excuse. In my last post, I told you I would be doing a home stay weekend at a traditional Korean home. Shortly before leaving, I was asked by the program director, Choi So Jin, to write an article for the UNIST magazine detailing the adventures of the weekend. I figured, since I had to write a blog post anyway, I would do both at once. The week was more full of homework and activities than I had anticipated, and then I had another weekend adventure that I just got back from, so this is a little late coming to you. I'll get a more informal post up in the middle of this week, but in the meantime, this is the article I wrote about the trip.
It is lengthy, and formal, so if it bores you I apologize. I included some pretty pictures, and this blog's first ever video(!), so hopefully that is entertaining enough to compensate for the long blocks of text in between them.

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Until stepping foot on South Korean soil, I had never left the North American continent. The only cultural excursions I had taken were expositions of my own culture – ventures to New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C. gave me a deeper sense of what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, and what that meant to different people around the nation. I stepped on the battlefields of the conflicts that birthed our nation from British imperialism, as well as those that reunited a nation divided along cultural and racial lines. I walked through the streets of Chinatowns, Mexicantowns, and Little Italy's, where people from all over the globe conglomerated to share their culture with the native people, who are almost all immigrants in their own right. In school, I've learned about American government and history from a very young age, but it is only in person that I have been able to fully realize the impact it has had on the culture I've grown accustomed to. It follows, then, that it is only by immersing myself in Korean tradition and history that I realized the cultural enormity of the small country I am visiting.

[Introductory paragraph about program excised for redundancy.]

On the first two weekends, UNIST arranged for all of the Michigan students to pair up with UNIST students for a home stay weekend in their home town. This was an excellent opportunity for all of us to experience Korean hospitality first hand, as well as witness for ourselves the values and operations of the Korean family. I was paired with Kwon SeongWoo, a junior student in Urban Engineering, whose home is the small rural town of Bong-hwa. Seong's family owns a traditional Korean home, which has been passed down through the Kwon family since his ancestor, Gwon Bul, first owned the structure. Gwon held a title similar to prime minister for the region during the Joseon Dynasty, in the mid 15th century. This made my experience especially unique; I was given the opportunity to walk through the halls of Korean history, and see for myself a piece of what has given this peninsula such a rich cultural heritage.

On the left, you see the 21st century. On the right,
you see the 15th.

Seong's grandparents are the ones who live in the home, but since they weren't around, we did not get the opportunity to enter the home itself. Even so, the tour was impressive. The home is structured in a rectangular shape, with an entrance on one side, and an open area in the middle. On either side of the entrance there are living spaces for children and guests. The open area stored many things, including large Onggi pots where sauces were stored, a small garden with tomatoes and other plants, and various other modern tools and living accessories. The right side of the building (immediately after entering) was a storage area, which is currently not in use, but was used for rice, grains, and other food stuffs in older times. The left side is a kitchen area, complete with a modern refrigerator and cookware, but also large wood-burning stoves in the far left corner which were intact from the original construction. Finally, the far side featured the main living quarters for the masters of the house (Seong's grandparents), as well as an open area towards the right where meals are taken. I'd never seen this style of construction before. It struck me as odd, because I have only been accustomed to modern homes, with one contiguous roof surrounded by the outdoors – this home was the opposite, surrounding the open outdoor area with rooms and storage compartments. However, I do think it is a little more efficient (if less spacious) than many homes today, in that you can get from any part of the home to any other by simply walking through the middle. In modern homes you often have to pass through several other rooms and/or staircases to get to your destination.

"No, Johnny, you can't go through the door yet, you'll have
to wait until you're older... and dead."

  The area also had several other buildings and annexes. From the home, we went to the ancestor home. This building, as Seong described to me, was used for ceremonies and holidays, where they invoke the spirits of their ancestors. It had the traditional red and green paint, several pillars, and the style of roofing that I recognize from ancient temples and spiritual areas. Outside of the structure's entrance, there was an additional entrance closer to the road. Seong explained that people were not allowed through this entrance – it was only opened in times of ceremony, so the spirits could enter, and be present when the living family members invoked them during the ceremony. I had only heard of the customs of ancestor worship in Eastern religions, because America, founded by Christian settlers, has no comparable traditions. It was a fascinating glimpse of both the beliefs of Joseon-era Koreans, as well as the traditions from which modern Korean culture has evolved. 

...looks fairly rock-colored to me.

The final building was farther removed from the main home, closer to the home's museum. There is a small stream that runs around the complex, and Gwon Bul had constructed a large space for gathering in the middle of the spot where the stream bends. To enter, you cross the stream over a stone slab, then walk up the steps to the main structure. The building itself is just an open space under a roof, with a small porch area on the far side enclosed by a wall and a couple of doors. It has the traditional roofing, as seen in the other buildings, as well as the traditional green paint and red trim that is common of buildings of the era. The interior is decorated with several frames filled with Chinese characters, as well as a large Chinese character nameplate in the middle  that reads "Chung Ahm Jeong" (translation: "blue rock building"). The building was used for large gatherings and ceremonious meals during the time of Gwon, but nowadays, some people like to sleep in the room in the summer time when it is nice enough to do so. It is a very picturesque scene, as the building is surrounded by the surrounding stream, as well as  the several bushes and small trees that are growing on the island area. I was struck by how this simply constructed (though intricately designed) building meshed so perfectly with the surrounding natural landscape, and for this reason, it is an image that I will hold in my memory for a long time to come.

The last stop on the visit to the traditional home was the museum. Gwon Bul was a very well-educated man for his time, and the museum gave evidence to this. Though it was a small room, there were many exhibits of artifacts from his personal life and accomplishments. They preserved the exam that he had passed in order to be educated in the first place, as well as many letter correspondences between him and other government officials and friends. There were several banners that had hung in specific parts of the building on display, as well as very well-preserved examples of some of the books he owned, wrote, and collected. However, I thought that the most interesting thing about the museum was not one of the ancient artifacts, rather, the living artifacts that Gwon has passed on through many generations of that family name. There was a wall-sized poster of the lineage of the Gwon/Kwon family name, tracing the generations from Gwon himself all the way down to Kwon SeongWoo. He pointed his name out on the board (all the way at the bottom), as well as pointing out where Gwon had turned into Kwon. I had known that the family name was important in the Korean culture, but this gave me a firm understanding of the rich tradition involved therein.

Homestay family! (minus Seong)

I would be remiss if I forgot to mention the excellent hospitality provided by Seong and his family. When we returned to his house, his mother had prepared delicious home-cooked Bulgogi, as well as many other side dishes. Though we were not able to communicate very well (neither of his parents spoke English), they went out of their way to ensure that I was comfortable. His father drove us to the traditional home, and his mother was so kind as to drop us off and pick us up after we went to a restaurant in nearby Gyeongju. On the next day, we went to a larger traditional village* with a Confucian temple and large culture museum describing the historical significance of the area, and they paid for an excellent lunch at a restaurant just outside of the facility. Finally, even when I waited for the bus to come and take me back to Ulsan, they waited with me for almost an hour just to ensure that I got onto the right bus and made my way home. I felt very comfortable and welcome during my entire stay, and I am very grateful to Seong and his family for being such wonderful hosts.

I came to Korea with only a little in the way of cultural foreknowledge. I knew about some modern culture points, and I knew of the family-centered mentality that the Korean people have. In terms of history, however, all I was really familiar with was the Korean war. I knew very little Korean history before the Japanese occupation, and even less about the culture. This trip was truly enlightening; I was introduced to, and familiarized with, aspects of the old and ancient culture that I would not have really understood had I not seen it for myself. The museums I toured displayed many artifacts and exhibits about the Gyeongju civilizations during the different dynasties, and getting to walk through the traditional home allowed me to infer much more about daily life and habits of long-ago Koreans. As a result, I learned more about the peninsula in one weekend than I had all my life. In the remaining weeks, I hope to expand on this early experience, and learn as much as I can about the Korean peninsula and its people. I realize that, through UNIST and the University of Michigan, I have been afforded a magnificent opportunity to do exactly that. I feel that taking full advantage of such an opportunity is the least that I owe.

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*I didn't include a whole lot about the village in Gyeongju because I'd already written like ten thousand words on the traditional home, but that was also pretty cool. There was a much larger museum than at the Gwon home, and the village consisted of many smaller renditions of the Gwon home, as well as a couple of other random buildings and annexes. Beside one of the buildings, there was set up a game called "Tuho," which is a simple game of rings and sticks. Throw the sticks in to one of the rings on either side of the tube, you get a point. Throw the stick in the tube, you get two points. This is me playing that game:

Not bad for a rookie, eh?

There are more pictures from the visit and the village on this brand new flickr account I set up for all the stills I've been plucking from the FlipCam videos (in lieu of having an actual camera). I literally just set it up for this blog post, so right now it's just mine, but I'll snag photos from the other 3 and make it bigger.

On the next installment of this 'ere blog, I go to Daegu, ride roller coasters, shop around an 11-story department store, go to the club, and encounter the most hilarious English fail of the trip thus far. Stay tuned, kiddies!