Week 1 -- Music and Mountains

Week 1 drew to a close this Friday. Everything's been good so far.  

1. (What I learned about Korea this week).

On Friday I decided to continue exploring the local culture, so I went to the Culture and Arts Center and got a ticket to the orchestra. They were doing a big concert, and I knew that I liked a lot of the music (such as Haydn's Clock Symphony), so I got a ticket. It was pretty cheap, only 10000 Won (about $8.50) It was an excellent show too, so that was money well spent.

Also on Friday, the other students in the lab and I went out to lunch at a local restaurant. The meal was good; soup and a salad that contained some raw fish. We sat cross-legged at very low tables, which I hadn't done in this country until then. It was a nice experience. And the guys were fun to eat with.

This weekend I decided to explore the hills behind Nuri Hall. The first path I took didn't go anywhere, but the second took me up into the hills and onto a nice selection of trails. I discovered there were a lot of graves up there, though. I found out from Clayton later that a lot of the hill area is a private cemetery, although people are allowed to walk the paths. But it was very peaceful walking among the trees.  I got some great photos from when I was high up, one of which is shown in section 3.

2. (Project status).

The lab work has been going well. I've finished doing the preliminary reading on C, C++, and the CAN bus system, and have started looking at the HUBO code proper. My first task is going through all the CAN functions and mapping out what everything does and which shared variables everything uses.  This way we can redo it in a more efficient manner later. There's a lot of code, but I've made good headway, and I've learned my way around the syntax of C++ pretty quickly.

3. (Photo of the week).

From the mountains behind our dorm, looking over the city:

4. (What I'm learning about myself).

I'm learning more about where my Korean is good, and where it's deficient. And I'm making lists of common phrases I need to know so that I can rehearse the Korean for those. I'm not as strong in it as I'd like to be, but I think I'm improving.

 

5. (New people I met this week).

The lab people are very nice, and it's been good getting to know them. In particular, Sean was really nice in telling me where the various pianos are on campus so I know where I can practice. Arthur was also very helpful -- he was our guide for the first day, taking us to the nano and satellite labs. They're a great group of people.

Week 1 -- Welcome to Daejeon

Clayton and I moved into Nuri Hall in Daejeon this week.

Clayton and I are spending a lot of our evening hours getting set up in the dormitory. We already went to the local HomePlus with Dan and the rest of the Drexel team to get some supplies like pillows, blankets, and voltage converters. We also picked up the things that RJ and Bryan left for us in the KAIST lab. With all this, and the things we packed, we should be pretty well set up for life in Daejeon.

We've also begun learning our way around. Today we walked from Nuri Hall to the HUBO lab to get a feel for how long it would take (about 50 minutes, although we walked slower than usual because we were exploring along the way), and also spent some time going through the KAIST campus to construct our mental maps of the place. The KAIST campus is huge, bigger than Drexel's by far, but we've already got a pretty good idea of where the various departments, labs, and stores are located.

In the lab itself we spent a lot of time with Dr. Jun Oh on Monday and Tuesday while the other Drexel people were with us. Once they went up to Seoul, we began working more on our own. Today we mostly focused on setting up our computers, both of which needed to have Windows reinstalled and some hardware work done. 

The people in KAIST lab have been very kind to us. Two of them drove us to and from dinner with Dr. Jun Oh and the other Drexel people on Monday night, and today one of them helped me find a couple rooms on campus that I had had trouble finding on my own. They are friendly; the lab seems like a place with a lot of camaraderie, which is of course a good thing.