Hey Jude...

Today is Wednesday in Korea. The last few days have been busy.

On Monday we took our 89,000 pounds of luggage to the airport in Osaka for our flight to Korea. The cab ride was about an hour and cost around $150! The airport was fairly deserted when we got there so it took no time at all to check in. Christophe is a member of Air France’s VIP Club so we were all able to go and wait in the Air Korea lounge.

I had a business class seat on my flight. The trip into Korea and then tomorrow to China are the only two business class tickets I have – the others are in coach. In fact, this was my first time in business class ever! It was nice, I was served orange juice while waiting for the everyone else to board. There was a good meal menu even though the flight was only a little over an hour. I was so tired I ended up reclining my seat and sleeping the entire time.

Passing through customs and immigration into Korea was interesting. They had some new customs workers and all were being very cautious processing us as we entered the country. Christophe’s passport is well worn and they detained him for about 15 minutes while checking to make sure his passport was authentic.

Monday night we got together for a simple meal in the hotel restaurant. The food was typical western style food. We were all pretty tired so we just ate and crashed.

Yesterday we went out to visit Korea Aerospace Industries. To enter the facility we had to show our passports and business cards and sign a paper stating we would support Korea’s anti-communist activities and keep what we saw in the factory a secret. The factory builds fighter jets for South Korea’s military.

We ended up spending the morning in a meeting with the manufacturing engineering staff where we talked about our new tools, prices, lead times, and other issues. After the meeting we headed to the plant cafeteria for some lunch. Unlike other asian countries South Koreans prefer stainless steel chopsticks. They are a little harder to use than wooden chopsticks, but not too bad. Anyway, one of the guys found me a fork, but I didn’t end up needing to use it. I grabbed a bowl of rice from the lunch line, a small serving of vegetables with red sauce on them, some bean sprouts, and one of our hosts found me a bowl of soup. The vegetables were served cold and the sauce was very spicy. The bean sprouts were ok, the soup wasn’t bad either though it was a little fishy. Mostly I ate rice. When I finished my rice I stole some of Christophe’s rice.

After lunch we had coffee, which was very good, and then headed to the factory floor to do our demo. The demo went well and the people at the plant seemed impressed. While speaking with our salesman, SY, he told me that the perception is that Japan and the United States have high quality while China has low quality. There are also some cultural barriers. For example, the Chinese typically won’t buy from the Japanese.

When we finished the demo we headed back to the hotel, had some coffee, then went our separate ways to catch up on work and take a break. We met in the lobby for dinner at 7PM. I thought we were just staying local, but one of our distributor reps wanted to take us out and now I wish I had brought my camera.

We went out for royal cuisine which consists of numerous dishes served hot and cold with a variety of textures. The restaurant had individual rooms for serving meals similar to the restaurant where we had tempura in Tokyo. We had to take our shoes off before entering then we sat on the floor indian-style around a low table on a cushioned seat similar to a stadium chair.

The first course was a bowl of abalone gruel. The color was a tan-greyish-white and the texture was sort of like a soupy mish-mash of ground up rice. The flavor wasn’t bad, but it’s hard to describe. Maybe a little fishy. Next came an assortment of raw and live seafood. This included slices of raw fish, both red spiny and black sea cucumbers, some sea animal about the size of my pinky, but hollow in the middle, (I am guessing this was a sea squirt because it kind of looked like the picture below, but each tube was a red looking meat.), and oysters on the half shell. We had soy sauce with wasabi for dipping as well as korean chili sauce. Well, me being brave, I reached in and went to grab one of the sea squirt things and it curled up! I let out a loud “whoa!” and nearly lept right out of my chair! The hostess, Steve, Christophe, SY and the distributor rep, Charlie, busted up laughing! I tried most everything else, except the oysters, but even at Charlie’s urging to try the sea squirt thing I just couldn’t do it. Every time I tried to grab one it would curl up and there was no way I could’ve managed to keep it down. Regardless, I am getting used to eating raw fish and it is actually quite good with wasabi and soy sauce. Next we had some delicious sticky rice with sesame seeds and something like a wheat pita with beans inside. Both were sweet and very good. Some squid was brought in whole for eating. This appeared to have been boiled. The hostesses cut up the squid into small pieces for eating with chopsticks. Now I understand how calamari is sliced so that there are rings! Next we were served a hot and spicy soup and some vegetables. The soup had some sort of roe in it. It was actually quite good. The hostess then brought in heavy pre-heated cooking plates and made a beef and mushroom stir-fry. The beef was served with a rice soup. The rice soup was fairly bland, but the beef and mushrooms were delicious. Last the hostess brought in some kimchi. I was warned about this, but had forgotten. Kimchi is basically a pickled cabbage and it is covered in a chili sauce that makes it wicked hot! My mouth and all the way down to my stomach was on fire. My eyes watered and my nose ran! WOW! I ate some more of the rice soup to soak up the spices and the warmth of the soup seemed to further activate the heat of the spice. It was incredible. The Koreans say that kimchi helps to relieve SARS and bird flu. I believe it – nothing could survive that heat! Lol.. During the meal we also tried a variety of Korean wines –similar to sake, but sweeter than a typical dry sake – and Korean soju which is a sweet and mellow potato vodka. Koreans drink soju very heavily – something like 1 billion bottles were sold last year alone at a dollar a bottle.

After dinner we headed out to a local bar. The bar was very nice and was set up with lounge acts that were covering popular American and Korean music. It was interesting hearing Cyndi Lauper’s “She-Bop” in Korean. We hung out late and got in to the hotel in time to catch some sleep before our calls on Wednesday…

Later, Wednesday night…

Well, today was pretty ordinary. We demo’ed our tools at the Korean Air Lines facility near the airport. That went very well. There is plenty of interest in our offering. While we were there a technician brought over a 20 year old tool he was having a problem with. Steve showed him how to operate the tool and it worked perfectly fine! 20 years old! Amazing!

KAL also had mock-ups of some of the parts of the 787 they would be manufacturing. This included the tail cone and nose gear wheel well. It was amazing to see how large these parts were. It gives a good idea of just how large the total aircraft will be.

Tonight we had a simple western dinner at the hotel then headed back over to the club to hang out and watch the cover bands. It was a blast. The bands are actually talented and did covers of Mariah Carey and the Beatles (Hey Jude) that were very good. The whole bar got into singing. It was fun!

So, that ends my trip to Korea. All in all it has been fun and interesting. I really enjoyed trying all the different foods at dinner on Tuesday night and we had a great time going out and listening to the live bands. Right now it’s time for me to head to bed. I have to catch a cab at 8AM tomorrow morning… I fly into Shanghai and then right back out again at 5PM to Xi’an. It’s nice to be on the last leg of the trip – I am looking forward to getting home soon.

As Christophe would say.. “Shhhbunk!” Off to bed! More soon…