Seoul - 17th July 2008

0730 - Naga woke me up. Showered, get geared up for battle.
0810 - Head for Dunkin' Donuts for coffee and breakfast. Brought coffee and breakfast onto the Metro. Reached Dongguk at approx. 0850.
0910 - We got our hands on the proceedings - our work in a proper book! Well, most of it done by Naga and K. But it was pretty satisfying nonetheless.
0930 - Conference officially starts. J-a-s-o-n M-e-r-c-h-a-n-t spoke first.
1100 - The first two paper presentations. Content was pretty heavy, though not as heavy as that of the first guest speaker's. The 4 invited speakers sort of grilled the presenters with questions and the speakers seem to handle them pretty well. We is gotten worried.
1200 - Lunch. Collected lunch coupon. K-o H-e-e J-e-o-u-n-g was queuing behind us. A lady came up to us, introduced herself as Hyun-yu, who'd gotten her Ph.D from NUS. She said she specially came for this conference partly because she saw presenters (us) from NUS. She also revealed that she'd been Prof. Tara Mohanan's (last) Ph.D supervisee.
1245 - After lunch (some rice with tonkatsu and corn soup) at the "cookhouse", Ms. Hyun-yu offered to treat us to coffee. We chatted quite abit - about her academic journey (City University for BA and MA, Chris Manning as supervisor before he left for Stanford), her "leave" halfway through her Ph.D to give birth, her naughty little gal, the Mohanans... it was nice knowing how our affiliations with NUS had helped us make friends and our stays overseas much better, albeit indirectly (the insitution probably deserves 2nd mention, the people 1st).
1335 - Was late for the talk before us. Again, got much substance.
1405 - Our turn. It went pretty ok, at least we were done in abt 20 mins. Surprisingly, the onslaught never really came - the Big Four were quite "subdued", one of them even sat out our presentation I think. After all the tension and mention, it was not quite what we had expected. Either we overwhelmed them, or we underwhelmed - sadly, it seems to be the later.
1450 - Tea-break. M-a-r-c-e-l had some positive comments, but we didn't get to speak to the other 3. Instead, one of the guys that had his poster on display was explaining to us his stuff about Korean DPs - got the both of us =S =S.
1500 - Went back for part one of the plenary talk. Pretty heavy stuff that ended at 1810. Headed back to Anguk area for dinner. Learnt that the elderly, besides having seats reserved for them on the Metro, actually travels for free on the Metro!
1830 - BBQ again. One of the waitresses was Chinese, which made ordering and all easier. She even came up to me and asked for some translations, mainly because she encountered a group of English-speaking customers earlier on in the day and couldn't really communicate with them. Her Korean was impeccable - she even wrote the syllables of the words I'd translated into Korean syllables/characters that had roughly the same sound! AND, beef in Korea is really at a PREMIUM...
2000 - Back at hotel. Showered and chilled online, while Naga slept.
2200 - Decided to head out and explore new places. Central Seoul is still bustling with activity - 24 hour Macs, KFCs, BKs, coffee joints, food places both on and off the street - there's this satay that they are selling (amongst other things) that's longer than a foot-long Subs... AND the protestors are still on the streets at 10pm! Hundreds of them! Doing what they believe is right... that's democratic citizenship! Even the police were busy closing the streets for them to march on lol...
2315 - Dropped by the minimart, picked up some bowl noodles and foodstuff for home, and headed back to Yims'. Naga still out cold. Showered and typing now; I've been blogging and chatting for 2+ hours le.... It's Friday, our last full day... gonna find out where else is selling BB cream....

Out.

~Ugly~