Another palace

This time it is Changgyeonggung, which is linked to the royal ancestral shrines at Jongmyo, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The first picture is of the hall containing the throne. Then there are some roofs, and below that is a picture of the very long hall that contains many of the royal ancestral tablets of the Joseon dynasty, which ruled for several hundred years until the Japanese came in the 1900s. The hall was not open to visitors.








Autumn is drifting away now, and the colour is dropping to the ground. Here, there is still some left on the trees. The Korean love of taking photographs of each other in every place that could remotely claim to be 'romantic' is on display.



And here are three pigeons enjoying the lazy Sunday afternoon.



Outside the shrines and palace was a large gathering of old people listening to loud and out of tune performances. This out-of-tunity seems to be very popular. They were dancing too.

Different facets of Seoul

The past few days have been occupied with looking after Stephen and Seb, who came over from Cambridge to set up a piece of equipment in Suwon, south of Seoul. Unfortunately, Stephen immediately fell ill and has spent almost all his time in the top hospital in Seoul (owned by Samsung, of course). The doctors think he has typhoid. So Seb and I have been visiting him, getting to know a Korean hospital quite well. There seem to a great many people wandering about the place, wheeling along their drip stands like a pet.

I helped to show Seb around Seoul at the weekend. We had a good night out with a couple from Suwon and a few random others on Saturday (including an American, two Germans, two Koreans and an Englishman). We played darts against the bar staff at a pub in Sinsa, and lost. The bar staff were joining in with our party - drinking behind the bar is clearly encouraged here! Below is a picture of us at dinner in a jazz bar/restaurant.



On Sunday night, we missed the last train home and didn't have any cash for a taxi. In our search for a late night cash machine (most stop working at 11.30), we strayed into the red light district, with the ladies of the night on display in neon-lit rooms lining the street. Apparently, these streets used to be quite common, but are rarer these days. Shortly after, we found a cash machine and we escaped!

A Note

I just want to point out that I don't condone the eating of live animals, even octopus! The dinner I described below was ordered before I knew what was coming, so I hope that I can be absolved of knowingly contributing to the poor octopus's ordeal. Once it was presented, I thought I might as well eat it.

Squirmy!

Tonight, four of us went for dinner at a local seafood restuarant where they serve the delicacy that is live octopus. Along with seventeen side dishes, there was a dish of chopped up octopus, all squirming around in a grey, writhing tangle. I must admit to feeling slight trepidation about trying this! It was a test of my increased chop-stick dexterity. Now the food not only moved but actively resisted being picked up by suckering on to the dish! Once I managed to pick a bit up and get it into my mouth I chomped on it thoroughly: I had no desire to have it stick to my throat halfway down. Chewing it was a bit odd because I could feel it sticking to my tongue like a row of poppers. The taste was as underwhelming as all octopus is. I must be lacking some taste-buds, because I can never taste much when eating octopus or squid. It's just an inoffensive rubbery texture.

Double Whammy

Wow, two posts in a day. Yeah, I'm on strike.

As promised earlier, here are some pictures of Olympic Park and taekwondo.







There were two teams in the taekwondo competition. One of the teams attempted blatant bribery to get the crowd on their side by distributing some sort of fruit or vegetable. I didn't get one so I am not sure what it was. It seemed quite hard, though, because people didn't seem to like it landing on their heads.

Trapped!

Since returning from Pohang last Monday, I have not yet escaped the lab except for a brief trip to a bakery. The whole weekend was taken up with running an experiment (till 3am on Sat and midnight on Sun). The results were almost completely useless, but nothing is ever without a positive side, and this weekend I watched about 10 episodes of Red Dwarf on youtube. Great! My laboratory habitat is shown below. The office and lab are as one, and my desk is the one on the right with the blue chair. No-one else is in at this point, but several members of the group showed up on Sunday night, working until at least midnight. They didn't even have experiments to run! It's crazy and, I believe, wrong. Also shown is the equipment that I am using. It is a Physical Properties Measurement System, an extremely user-friendly cryogenic apparatus. A marked change from the Big Fridge in Cambridge!





And here is my dinner on Saturday night: cold baguette pizza. Actually, it was very nice and deserves a photo.



In fact, I got so bored on Saturday that I started taking pictures of myself in the lab (below). And to make it worse, I was wearing my Nature Physics T-shirt. How utterly tragic! Need my hair-cut, but I might just leave it and see what happens.

This weekend, I was at a workshop at the Pohang Institute for Science and technology (POSTECH) on the south-east coast of Korea. The main part of the university is shown below. It was deserted and slightly grim. It reminded me of Swansea centre.



On the plus side, the seafood was excellent. I went with a couple of other attendees to a fish restaurant in the fish market near the harbour. Below is the sushi that we had, a tank of crabs waiting their fate and a general view of the market. Just about every meal we had in Pohang involved seafood of some sort - excellent! The conference was good too; there were only invited speakers (international) which meant that the quality was that much higher.