Friday recap

Apologies for not blogging last night. I had a busy morning of meetings and then was asked to go out with my staff for their Employee Appreciation Day activity. I had nothing on my calendar (just work...shh...) so I decided it'd be a nice time to get to know the local team a bit better.

Back to the meetings. Overall they went really well, however, Asians are notoriously quiet during meetings...and particularly when the speaker is not speaking their native tongue. Thursday morning was pretty quiet during the first two hours but then they started to warm up to me a bit and we ended up having quite lively discussions. The same thing happened on Friday...started a little bit quiet but by the end of the day there was a ton of discussion. We even got into some personal discussions which is pretty rare. It is certainly one thing that is noticeably different about the culture here versus the US. People in the US never hesitate to raise issues, concerns, or just plain make it clear they don't want to be there. Anyway, at the end of it the meetings went well and I got some good feedback from the team.

After the meeting the team took me out for a traditional Korean meal. This means a table full of food. I wish I would have had thought to take a picture but imagine a table with literally no spare space because it is covered in bowls and plates of food. For every 2 people, they have small dishes with kimchi, potato pancakes, avocado, onion, and spinach. Then in the middle of the table they bring out a large plate of full pieces of different kinds of lettuce (this is so you can make something similar to lettuce wraps) along with a platter of beef and a platter of duck. In addition to this, you also get two bowls of soup and a bowl of rice. Needless to say I couldn't eat it all but dang was it good. I even tried the beef and it was pretty good. But the duck was certainly the best. Americans have absolutely no idea how to cook duck...this was so good...seasoned and almost smoked/cured in flavor...yummy!

After lunch we headed out to the Employee Appreciation Day activities. I rode with three of my staff members and most of the time they were speaking to each other in Korean. This may sound rude but it actually wasn't that bad. The first activity was to tour the KOFIC Namyangju Studios. Apparently South Korea has a pretty big local film industry and this is the place where most of the blockbusters are filmed. There wasn't a heck of a lot to see there but it was pretty interesting for me to learn that the film industry is so big here. The picture below is from one of the permanent sets which depicts a traditional South Korean village.

After the film studio we headed to a coffee museum. Actually...let me back up a minute and tell you that we were about 45 minutes Southeast of Seoul. The countryside of Seoul could easily be in the US. Nice mountains, lots of trees, cool weather since it is autumn here, and a couple of big rivers. If it weren't for the signage being in a different language and a little bit different architecture I would think I was in the US. Anyway...back to the coffee museum. So, they do not grow coffee here, however, they do like to drink it. There are a TON of local coffee shops and I have to say that it is pretty good coffee...especially for an Asian country. But, none of us could figure out why there is a coffee museum in this little town outside of Seoul. It looked more like a mental institution than a museum and having just been on the tour in Kona it really didn't teach me anything. We did get to grind and brew our own coffee...woohoo...really, I do that every day.

After the coffee tour we headed to the restaurant downstairs and had a Western style dinner of steak and potatoes. For those of you who know me well you know that I don't eat beef. I didn't get the opportunity to order and I have learned that Asians take rejection of their food pretty poorly so I sucked it up and ate half of a steak for the first time since I was probably 9 or 10 years old. After dinner there was a classical music concert. It was actually a woman playing piano and a soprano singing along. Most of the songs were in English but the guy doing the introductions was speaking in Korean. It was great because every so often the gals on either side of me would lean over and translate for me. At one point he made a comment about 'the foreigner' in the audience and everybody looked at me and laughed...not in a bad way...it was kind of fun. The concert was actually quite nice and I think that I enjoyed the few Korean songs more than the American songs.

At about 9 pm we headed back to Seoul. The gals that I rode with thanked me many times for taking the time to spend the afternoon and evening with them. What they don't know is that is was actually quite fun for me...getting to see the people from our Korean office have a function and listening to them tell me about the area and their lives and visiting the US and asking me a ton of questions...it was great.