So today was our first full day in South Korea. My day started out much earlier than it should have thanks to jet lag and the heat (the air conditioning turns itself off at night), but I'm hoping that I will get used to the time and the heat soon enough.
We got up and out of the dorms by 8 and we headed over to a little bakery/ cafe place right off of campus called Paris Baguette, which did not sell anything french, which I thought was weird. But what was weirder was some of the food that we ate for breakfast, I had a pizza thing that had cheese, marinara sauce, slices of what looked to be a hotdog, and then there was some cooked corn sprinkled in between it all. It was quite a way to start the day.
We then caught the bus which takes us the 45 minutes from the University of Ulsan over to HHI. HHI was a really cool place, we received our badges and headed to the cultural center to learn about HHI and its founder, Asan, who was a very accomplished man. Not only did he found Hyundai, but he organized the Olympics in 1988, and he ran for presidency, among other crazy, impressive things. After that, we got on another bus to get a quick tour of the shipyard, we saw where all of the shops were, a couple of the dry-docks and the work that was going on in them, and we got a gist of how the yard operates.
After that we had lunch, and spent the rest of the time going through paperwork, getting some safety briefs, and getting issued our uniforms. Our uniforms are gray outfits; pants and shirt, with black, steel toed sneakers, along with a white hard hat. Hopefully I will be able to get some pictures up of that. But taking photos anywhere inside the yard is strictly prohibited. So I apologize if you were looking forward to seeing some of those. But I am going to see if I can get a picture of us in our uniforms.
We left HHI and headed back to the dorms, we took an hour or so to relax, and then we headed out to get a micro tour of the campus, and then head out to dinner, which was amazing! I am just going to put some pictures below of dinner because I don't think I have the vocabulary to quite explain what we ate tonight. All I know is that I am not going to go hungry ever, and that food was really good!
Here are a couple of pictures of the NAME building at the UoU.
Above are a couple of pictures of the area just outside of the university. The top left is main intersection with the school and the main road. The picture on the right is just a street view of the many shops and other things that we saw as we walked to dinner. Bottom left is a picture of a bus that somebody converted into a Levis store. Just thought it was an interesting sight.
Now this was dinner. We got to the place and we had to take off our shoes, as is custom for many places here, but we really needed to take them off because we were eating from the floor. Well, almost, we were sitting on the floor and the table was barely a foot high. This dinner place was a fondue type thing. But it wasn't fondue. Instead they heated up beef broth in this bowl in front of us which we then preceded to fill with lettuce and beef until it was cooked. Once the beef was cooked, we took it out and put it on top of our little rice paper thing. Then we put some veggies alongside the beef and folded it up like a mini burrito, which we then dipped in different sauces. After the mini burrito things were finished, we had these huge potsticker things, along with noodles. We finished off the dinner with some rice soup. Which was really good and I wish that I could have eaten more, but I was just too stuffed from all of the goodness eaten right before.
Tomorrow we start our first day of tours and learning in the actual shops at HHI. I will let you know all about that when we get back tomorrow night!
- Jake
