Life back "home"

It's been a while since I've last posted on this blog. That's partly due to an 8 day visit to California where internet was almost impossible to get. The other reason was the more shameful one; procrastination... I've been in Korea with great internet (the fastest in the world) for quite some time now and I've been pushing off this blog post day after day... I finally felt like I should update my side of the adventure after Jack posted his third post. So, here it is!

I landed at the Incheon (인천) International Airport around 11 PM on Friday, June 17th with my brother. Walking through the airport I got a wave of nostalgia but at the same time, it was different and new. The airport was really empty since it was so late at night but that wasn't the only difference. The airport felt warmer than what I last remembered. I soon learned that Korea passed a law (I think?) that prevents public places from turning the AC on to lower the temperature below I think 22 degrees C. It's all for energy saving which I find is excellent but I was pretty hot while walking through the airport... There were other things that I felt was different but that's not really that important so I'll move on now. After my brother and I collected our bags we went outside and saw our parents. I haven't seen my mom since November and my dad for at least 2 years so it was pretty darn good to see their faces again. We drove home to their apartment and talked about life and such. I ended up going to sleep at 5 in the morning and then waking up at 7. Needless to say two hours of sleep is not enough... but I managed throughout the day without taking any naps (WHOO!). So it was the 18th and it was a Saturday and what better way to spend a Saturday than to meet up with a friend from Michigan! I meet Yong Il Kwon who's an Mechanical Engineer at UofM and we had lunch together with him and my family. Apparently my dad knew his dad from when they both went to Tokyo University for their studies so it was a cool thing; the fathers and sons meet at school. After that we headed off to see family relatives. I got to see my mom's older sister and her husband who recently had a stroke but is recovering very well. I also got to see one of my dad's younger brothers and we ate dinner with my dad's older brother and his family. Seeing my cousins (who are a lot older than me) after 5 years was pretty shocking. When I left 5 years ago one of my cousins just got married and the other one was dating his soon-to-be wife. Now between the two of them they have five children and two more on the way! A pretty busy family. But it was fun to be an uncle to them. We played rock paper scissors and other sorts of fun games. It also made me feel old... but that's sometimes a good thing right? Right... After visiting family we slept at a hotel and then headed down south towards Ulsan and UNIST. A busy first full day for me. I slept a lot in the car ride down... but UNIST was waiting for me and boy what a fun four days it has been!

So it's Sunday and I arrive late... great first impression right? I gave UNIST a heads up on my late arrival so it was all good. And for your information I didn't arrive on Michigan time... it was more like a couple hours late. Anyways, I ate dinner with the head of the international affairs at UNIST and with the three other Michiganders who are participating in this program; Jack, Clayton, and Labiba. We ate at this pizza place called Bella di Notte; pretty good pizza for Korea! It was pretty cheap too. After that, I went to my dorm room and basically fell asleep at 10 PM. I was dead tired and we had class in the morning so I thought "Let's get a lot of sleep!"... NOT! I woke up at 4 AM and stayed awake till the class started. I think I've gotten used to sleeping for 6 hours or less cause I can't seem to sleep longer than that. I automatically wake up after 6 hours... not a pleasant thing. Anyways, before we start our research us Michiganders are taking a introduction to the Korean language and culture course; except that's really not necessary for me. So the first day I helped the teacher with teaching the other three consonants and vowels. It was pretty fun. But alas, the fun died when the teacher decided to give me this test to see where my Korean is at in terms of proficiency... So now, instead of having the knowledge that I'll be A+-ing the course, I'm faced with writing paragraphs in Korean, which is very difficult for me... My level of Korean is that of a middle school student. That's not good. We'll see how the test goes tomorrow...

Other than the language course, I've been having a blast eating Korean food, playing frisbee, "studying" for the GRE and just relaxing in Korea. Jack basically told what happened in terms of activities in the last couple of days so I won't reiterate them. We actually discussed the blog and decided that we'd alternate weeks so that we don't run into the issue of recovering stuff that the first blogger posted.

For the weekend, I'm going back up to Seoul this weekend to spend time with my parents and brother which should be good. But I'm actually pretty excited to get the research started. Guess I'll have to wait until July 4th for that. At least I can celebrate two things that day!

Well, I'm going to sign off for now. Hopefully I can get some sleep so that I don't absolutely blank on my test tomorrow. See you guys soon!

As always, Go Blue!

Arrived and Alive in the City of Ulsan

The first difference I noticed between my culture and Korean culture was chilling... literally. I was waiting in Seoul Station for the 7:30am train to Ulsan, and having spent a restless night playing online Catan in Seoul Incheon airport, desired a keep-me-up to tide me through the 2 hours I'd be spending in transit. There was a Dunkin' Donuts there in the station, so I ordered from them a coffee and 2 glazed donuts. The cashier there spoke as much English as I spoke Korean, which is to say absolutely none, so the ordering process was a classic case of the pointing game. After a little while of that, I eventually received my refreshments and went to a table to enjoy it and try and find the internet. I hadn't really paid attention to what she was doing behind the counter, and it was only when I took a sip of my coffee that I realized my mistake – instead of the piping hot kick in the ass that I was expecting, I received an ice-cold punch in the mouth. Nobody had told me that they like their coffee cold here in South Korea. Dreading the prospect of attempting to communicate this discrepancy to that cashier, I slogged it down, and having no success with the internet, directed my attention to remainder of the trip.

After an uneventful train ride and a disorienting taxi ride, I eventually landed at the UNIST dorm at around 10:30am on Saturday. The dorm rooms here are suite-style, so I have my own room within the room, and there's a shared common area and bathroom. The campus is tucked away in the mountains on the west-most part of the city, kinda far away from... well, everything. The closest part of the city is a 10 minute bus-ride, and most of the attractions of downtown Ulsan are at least a half hour away by the same medium. It comes as a relief, then, that the campus here is very impressive. It is clean and pristine, and the view of the mountains that surround the area is a sight to be seen (rhymes!). Pictures don't do it justice... but here's their attempt:

Engineering buildings. This is the view from the library, at one particular angle. Rotate that about 90 degrees...

... and you have the view of the lake and mountains. Drastic difference, no?

Once I find the time and a nice enough day, I'll take the FlipCam out and give y'all a walking tour of the campus.

Barbecuing Octopus, Korean Style

The thing that I've had the most experience with in what little time I have spent here is the food. Over the last couple of days, I have twice had legitimate Korean barbeque. The first time was Tuesday night, where Ga Ram, Clayton, Labiba and I (henceforth referred to as the USURFour) all traveled to the urban area of Ulsan closest to UNIST, for dinner. At a Korean style barbecue, everybody sits around a table with an oven insert in the middle. You order the meat, and (after you receive a plethora of various side dishes) it is brought out to you raw, and you cook it yourself on the grill. We got a family platter for the four of us which consisted of pork shoulder (typical meat texture), pork intestine (very rubbery, chewy), and some pork sausage as well. The second time was the next day, Wednesday, where the USURFour and several UNIST faculty went out to eat after sightseeing, and we cooked pork ribs and octopus meat, or (insert Korean name). It was the first time I'd ever tried octopus. It was served with (some sauce) which gave it a mild, tangy flavor, and while it was somewhat rubbery, but not quite as bad as the intestines from the previous day. Many people eat octopus raw (some people eat it very raw), so it didn't need to spend a whole lot of time on the grill before it was ready and delicious.

I mentioned the sightseeing. On Wednesday, we went to visit two museums, both of which exhibited integral parts of the culture and history of Ulsan. The first of which was the Jangsaengpo Whale Museum in Gong-Du. Whaling has been internationally banned since 1986, but before that, was a thriving industry in Ulsan. Many residents of the southeastern Korean cities of Ulsan and Pusan eat whale meat to this day, and there is a push by the people of these cities to make it a legal and regulated process. The most interesting thing about the museum, in my opinion, was the tremendous difference in 1970s Ulsan and modern-day Ulsan. The ship yard where the museum is located is now dominated by Hyundai heavy industry, the ship-building capital of the world, but a mere 30 years ago it was a relatively undeveloped port specifically for whales. After that, we went to a restaurant on the bordering street and ate fresh (and delicious) sashimi, courtesy of UNIST. Though whale meat was on the menu, none of us were daring enough to have a go.

Onggi Pottery

The second museum was the Onggi Village at Oego Mountain, an area 20 minutes south of downtown Ulsan. Onggi is a type of earthenware pottery, made from clay, mixed with a little bit of sand to introduce porosity, and glazed with lye. Onggi describes pottery made from this special method, and shaped on a pottery wheel with special tools and methods that allow a 1-m tall jar to be shaped and ready to fire in as little as three hours (compared with two weeks for Western pottery of the same size). Koreans use onggi pots to store many different powders and sauces, as well as fermentation of some of their foods, including the staple dish of Kimchi. Because it was raining, we decided to take the opportunity to be instructed on making our own small pottery. I made a large bowl, decorated it with the carving and stamping tools they gave us, and carved my name (in the Korean alphabet) in the bottom. The rest of us made mugs, small pots, and Labiba made a vase that (mostly) resembled the shape of the actual Onggi we had just seen in the museum. The village will glaze and fire the pots for us, and they will be sent to UNIST in the next couple of weeks.

Me, and my new favorite bowl.

This weekend is the homestay for all of the USURFour. I have been in contact with a UNIST student, and I'll be staying in his home town of Gyeongju this weekend. I'm told that this area is a more traditional Korean home, but I don't really know what to expect from that. However, I know that this guy speaks English, and fairly well at that, because I've been communicating with him via email and Facebook for the last couple of weeks. I'm really looking forward to meeting him, and his family, and reporting back to you once it is all said and done. I'm off to play frisbee one last time before the rainy month starts. Talk to you next week!

Precariously Perched on My Proverbial Seat

Have you ever played "Never Have I Ever"? It's a common icebreaker, though my experience with it over the last few years has mostly been with larger groups of friends, and last year especially, mostly incorporated within everyone's favorite royal card game of social lubrication. Everybody in the circle starts by holding up a certain number of fingers (generally 5 or 10), then people take turns around the circle saying things that they have never done. If anybody else in the circle has done what you have not, then those people put a finger down, and the first person to put all of their fingers down loses (or wins, if you want to look at it that way). One of the phrases that I've come to use almost every time I've played is to say "never have I ever left the continent." Well, in about 12 hours, I will no longer have the ability to use that particular finger-dropper.

My flight departs from Flint at 1:30pm and the first stop is in Detroit. If this seems strange to you, it should. Apparently, through a travel booking friend of my father, departing from Flint was about $200 cheaper than from Detroit because it's a Canadian flight... and since Canadians are obviously worse pilots than Americans, the price decrease is entirely justified. Or something like that. I clear customs in Detroit, then from there I fly 14 hours to Tokyo Narida airport. I hope to catch up on some sleep over the Pacific, which is the reason that this blog is going out in the early, early morning – I'm purposefully exhausting myself by pulling an all-nighter tonight. My final connection is from Tokyo to Seoul Incheon, where I am scheduled to land at 11:15PM local time.

USS Enterprise Seoul Incheon International Airport

Seoul Incheon airport is a really, really nice airport. It is in a short discussion of the world's best, actually, consistently competing with Singapore Changi and Hong Kong International for the Skytrax Airport of the Year Award. It last won that award in 2009, and in 2011, placed third behind those two I just mentioned. The only reason I bring that up is that I will be spending the night there. Since Seoul is in the opposite corner of the country, I have to take a train from there to Ulsan; however, trains don't run past midnight, so I booked my train for 7:30AM the next day, and will have all night to explore the world's (third) best airport. I'll be bringing my video camera for the occasion, so if I find something interesting enough to film, I shall do so and share it with the rest of you.

While cubicle shops are not interesting in and of themselves,
I'm sure I can make them fun somehow.

In conclusion, these next two days are going to be the strangest two days of my life. I will be thrust into a strange continent, totally unfamiliar with the language, hopping from plane to plane to plane to train, with many hours of layover and other random grief in between. I will be disoriented, confused, stressed, exhausted, bored, restless, cramped, paranoid, hungry... and I am absolutely thrilled to get started.

Greetings, Readers!

Welcome aboard! This is my first blog post on this brand new blog, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jack Rosette, and I am a nuclear engineering student entering my Junior year at the University of Michigan. Right now I'm located in Ann Arbor, but I rotate between there and Troy, MI, in terms of a hometown. I must disagree with my friend GaRam; Ann Arbor is a wonderful place in the summer, and I've always found things to do. I prefer it vastly to Troy, but I suppose that shouldn't be much of a surprise... there's things to do in Ann Arbor.

So since GaRam got to do the very first post, there isn't much I can tell you about the program that you don't already know from him. The U-SURF program gives us the opportunity to do research under a UNIST professor in a laboratory setting for a full month, as well become immersed in the Korean culture and language. The program lasts 6 weeks, and the first two will be spent in what is described as "survival Korean," a class that will attempt to give us a basic understanding of the language. I'm not really sure how I'll do... the only language I've ever studied is Spanish, and even then I wasn't particularly good. My goal is to pick up enough to not embarrass myself while trying to converse.

After that comes the research. There were only a few projects offered that had directly applicable research for a nuclear engineering student, but I was fortunate enough to be selected to my first choice. I will be researching under Dr. Hyungjoon Cho, an Assistant Professor at UNIST in the School of Nano-Bioscience and Chemical Engineering Department. While that doesn't exactly sound nuclear, Dr. Cho is the lead researcher at the Biomedical Imaging Sciences (BIS) Lab at UNIST (homepage: http://sites.google.com/site/bislabunist/home), and was awarded his Ph. D. in Nuclear Science and Engineering at M.I.T. in 2005. I am very excited to work with science and techniques that are related to my studies, and even more excited to get my first practical lab experience. I hope to learn a lot from the time I spend in the lab next month.

Next month indeed. I take off on June 16, and the program goes from June 18-July 31. Research itself doesn't start until the 4th of July, which I actually didn't realize until just now. I guess I should plan on wearing something obnoxiously American to mark the occasion.

And now, pictures!

Ulsan Industrial District. Home of the corporate conglomerate of Hyundai, Ulsan is the industrial hub of South Korea.

This is a pretty sweet shot of a bridge over some rocks at Ulsan. Since it is a coastal city, I anticipate a visit to a beach or two.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

-Jack Rosette

The beginning to something amazing.

It's been 5 years since I've last been in Korea. I've been longing to eat some legitimate Korean food and to see my parents and relatives. I've also been waiting for a chance to get out of Ann Arbor. Don't get me wrong, Ann Arbor is a great place (when the weather isn't just rain rain rain...) but I've been stuck here for the past two summers and there's not a whole lot to do. But anyways, I'm rambling on about things that aren't informational to this particular trip.

I should probably start off with an introduction of myself. My name is GaRam Jun and I am a junior studying Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. I am a Korean American born and raised in America. That's about it for my introduction. I don't want to spill all my secrets...

Now, more about this trip to Korea. First off it's South Korea, not North. Obviously that makes sense, right? I mean... very few people can even get into North Korea much less go research there... Okay, I don't think that this joke is that funny so I'm going to stop now and move onto serious stuff...

Anyways, I was gratefully accepted in the U-SURF Research and Korean Culture program. U-SURF stands for Ulsan Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. With this program we'll be learning the Korean language and Korean culture for 2 weeks and then we'll be participating in top notch research at the Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). I'm not exactly sure what kind of research I'll be doing (something to do with semi-conducting materials and optics.. yeah. I'm confused too) but what's the fun in knowing everything in the world?? As for the class, I think I'll be pretty prepared seeming as I am a Korean who can (somewhat) speak and read Korean. I lived in Korea for 2 years from when I was 12 to when I was 14 and attended middle school. Needless to say, I was sort of forced to learn the language to survive (well not really survive... but you get the point). This part of the blog will become more and more detailed as the adventure progresses. Hopefully this was enough background information for y'all!

So, since this summer has started I have been researching in the Material Science Department at the University of Michigan. Saturday June 4th will be the last time I step foot in my lab for more than two months which makes me sad but not sad enough to make me cry... I'll be back on August 10th. Other than that, I've been hanging out with friends, watching movies, practicing some cello, and most importantly.. SLEEPING! Yes, I've missed sleeping a lot throughout the semesters and it's much needed. Anyways, I think that's enough for now. I shall be keeping all of you up to date on things to come. Thanks for reading! Hopefully you'll feel the excitement from this blog as much as I will from experience the trip!

PS: Saturday, June 4th 2011 marks the 102nd day (and counting!) that I have not consumed a Big Mac.