Paul's Secret Weblog: Paul Goes to Korea

I had a little adventure this past week. I flew to Seoul, Korea to present a paper at a graphics conference.

After landing, I got on the subway. Korean subways are immaculately clean and they have heated seats. They also are stocked with gas masks and the monitors presented a surprisingly graphic safety video. Everywhere the Koreans demonstrated their technological superiority. There were flat screen TVs everywhere including in front of escalators. Our hotel toilet came with a control panel which I used to wash and dry my butt. It tickled. On elevators, you can push once to go to a floor and twice to not go there.

Getting from the subway to my hotel was hard, mostly because Google maps was way off. Eventually, I got a nice monolingual Korean to draw me a map. It was bitter cold that night and I was exhausted because of the time change. When I arrived the bags under my eyes were blue from the cold.

The first day, I want to a palace built in the 14th century. The palace guards paraded around with funky instruments and fake beards.

The architecture was pretty cool, but my toes were even colder. So we sought shelter in a folk museum and learned about acupuncture and exorcism.

My favorite thing was the Buddhist temples. Inside they have three spectacular Buddha statues.

The next few days, I was tied up with the graphics conference, but I did visit a second Buddhist temple. A kind Buddhist lady there offered to me a free personal tour. I peppered her with questions about Buddhist beliefs. She said that after Buddhist monks die and are cremated they take a crystal from the ashes and store them in these.

Buddhists pray, but Buddha isn't God. So I asked her who Buddhist pray to. I repeated the question, but I don't think she understood it.

She told me there is a large statue for a future Buddha who will be born in 5 billion years. It's a good thing they already have his statue ready.

Korean food was completely new to me. I tried everything I could. I was surprised once to see my order come with a raw egg on top, but the bowl it was in was so hot that the egg gets cooked once you mix it. Koreans are crazy about Kimchi which is cabbage or some other vegetable that has been fermenting for a few months. I ate a bunch of it, but I didn't care for it. My favorite was the meat you cooked yourself on a grill. Here is a feast I enjoyed with some of my Stanford buddies. We even ordered a second round of food after this plus drinks for the non-Mormons and it was still pretty cheap.

I gave my presentation and it went pretty well. It helped that I was prepared for one of the questions beforehand, since I serendipitously discovered it scrawled on a piece of paper.

The last day I went to the North Korean border. Near one of the world's most heavily armed borders, I saw this

Yes, it's a small amusement park. The South Koreans also built a shiny new train station near the border that never gets used, but it's all ready to go to North Korea once the country gets unified. Actually, they don't even call it a border since they insist that Korea is still one country. The most interesting thing I saw there was a tunnel the North Koreans dug to infiltrate the South. When the South Korea discovered it, they turned it into a tourist attraction. Inside the tunnel, I got within 170 meters of North Korea. The tunnel wasn't high, so I had to crouch down the whole time. I kept thinking how inconsiderate the North Koreans were for building their secret tunnel so low. Here are some pictures of North Korea off in the distance