Hi Sionnsar,
Sorry I missed you last night.
Things are good here, same old.
How is your trip going?
Is it all work, or are you getting to do tourist things too?
How's the food?
Hi, fanfan! No problem -- I'm in a time zone so far from you all it's hard to keep up. It's early morning there, and I'm about to turn in for the night.
Trip is going fine. I've been able to do some tourist things. Arrived Monday night (local time) and had Tuesday off, so a colleague and I toured some of the palaces and markets of Seoul. Thursday afternoon the whole committee was taken on a tour... of a palace complex my colleague and I had toured two days before. The "Sacred Garden" there is, to my eye, exquisitely beautiful in its autumn colors.
We wound up mid-afternoon today (we were supposed to wrap up by 12:30, but a battle broke out over some issue before us), and after that I took a bus tour of Seoul, stopping off at the Korea Folk Museum (where I learned about life in Korea from near-prehistoric to recent times, and of the making and the many, many varieties of kimchi) and yet another impressive palace complex, before heading back to the hotel and dinner at a nearby Korean barbeque restaurant (delicious, though I find Korean chopsticks a bit difficult to handle, quite unlike Chinese and Japanese).
Maybe I should post a photo or two, next time I get online?