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!