Dane and I, two chemical engineering students at UF, were sent to South Korea for two months.
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Friday, June 09, 2006

A good weekend Part One

This Thursday, after going to the gym and talking to Katie, I got the urge to leave the University and head to some random, historical place around Daegu. I got my city tour guide book out of my backpack, took a quick glance at the pages, and decided where to go. My chosen destination was Yeongnam's First Gate.


My plan of action was to take the free shuttle from the university to Sawol station, and from there get a ticket to reach Haean station, about half an hour away. However, sometime in between me steeping into the shuttle and getting out of it, I got the directions confused and opted to get out at another subway station. This ultimately led me to the wrong place, a memorial park in honor of the repayment movement that spread around Korea after it got its Independence from Japan. This delayed my trip for over an hour since I got lost in one of the markets, and it took me forever to find my way back to the subway. Once I did, however, things didn't get any easier. I only had a five thousand won bill, and the machine that provides the metro coins only accepts one thousand won ones. I tried to call security to explain the situation but the language barrier was too much to get my point across and I spent ten minutes arguing with two metro cups with no positive results.



Things got better when this Korean metro sexual approached the confused group of the two cops and me, and offered me to pay for my metro coin; Koreans are good like that, sometimes. So off I went to my destination!! I thought that once I reached Haean Station, finding the gate would be easy, but WAS I confused. When I got there, I had no idea which way to walk towards, and I wondered aimlessly for over forty minutes looking for the damn thing; I tried to ask some people by pointing into my city tour's guide but that was of no use. Finally, by some hint of luck, I was able to get a glimpse of what looked like some ancient building, and I started walking towards it.


And I walked




And I had to cross a river, so I had to find the closest bridge, which was quite far




And I kept on walking


And walking


And the monument got closer


and closer





And voila! I got there. By this point, I was exhausted and I just wanted to get some pictures of the place and bounce! The weather wasn't helping as it had started to rain. I was lucky enough to get some random Korean dude to take a picture of me in front of my chosen destination, and after an hour of touring around the area and watching the place (and taking pictures of course), I proceeded to get my brown butt out of there before it started to rain any harder.





Once I got back to the University, I met up with Dane and made some plans to drink. We went to a nearby convenience store and bought a couple of Hite Pitchers; once that was done, we headed off to the lab for some REAL research! We watched Underworld and then I went to my studio to prepare for the weekend's trip to Gonju.

Monday, June 05, 2006

No Soju and some fat

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Yesterday, I thought, would end being just a regular, normal day at Daegu, but right before I went to sleep, Won Chol called me and told me to meet him in a bar a few blocks from where we live. When i got there, I was confronted with the usual agglomeration of Korean men, followed, as usual, with their copious amount of beer, soju, and makali; no women were to be seen around us.

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As I almost got Alcohol poisoning last week from drinking eight soju bottles with Junho, I was adamant about not having a single drop of soju that night; this seemed to piss some of the Korean guys that were with us, but I really didn't give a damn about their feeling towards me; my health is above any of these bastards wishes! Anyhow, we went to the usual three bars, beginning with beer, continuing with soju (they did), and ending with makali, the rice beer Koreans love. I got somewhat wasted and rather annoyed by this Korean guy who seemed to have disliked me from the get-go when I pointed at him when asked who looked the oldest in the group. Apparently, looking old is something disliked by most koreans, and I honestly thought it would be the contrary since most guys look like they are on their early teens even when they are approaching thirty. So this friction with this guy made the night somewhat bothersome, but I didn't allow it to get into me; I still enjoyed the usual conversations with Won Chol, who was kind enough to buy me a Korean team T-shirt.

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We ended the day at four am, and I dropped dead the instant my head touched the pillow. I woke up today with a rather mild headache and I decided to get a smoothie, and then continue to the gym. On my way there, I passed through a group of middle schoolers who seemed to be shocked at the sight of me; maybe it was that I hadn't shaved for over a week, or that I didn't calm my hair, or maybe it was just the fact that they are not used to watching a Guatemalan roaming around their Korean streets. Whatever the case maybe, they stopped me and started bombarding me with questions, generic, memorized questions that was, because when I would answer them they would still remain clueless. Anyhow, I was surprised by their excitement so I asked to take a picture with them.

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As you can see above, the girls were pretty shy, and the guys even worse, being that no one dared to appear in it. Aside from that, I went to the gym and did my usual workout, and I met this guy with the English name of David. He volunteered to do a body composition analysis with this rather cool machine that only requires your weight, age, sex, and heartbeat to calculate your fat percentage, and muscle percentage. I am 67.5 Kg, 172 cm, 21 years old and a male. The machine spit out the following results: I am 54.4 kgs of muscle, 13.6% fat, and the rest I have no idea since the report is in Korean.

Well, that's been the day thus far. Now I am stuck here in the lab trying to get a power point presentation done about the production of Phthalic Anhydride, amongst other things.

Success....

Sunday, June 04, 2006

HITE






Korea regretfully lost against Senegal yesterday night on a tragic 3-1. Nonetheless, this game was significantly better than the last one against Norway. Also, we had--as always--some HITE to enhance the experience. GO COREA!