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| by Zwei | Bier | en | Korea- July 24-30, 2006 |
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Lotte World. The President's dinner. Monday, July 24 One of the sites I visited last night had a pretty good solution for organizing pictures and text: pictures on the left and right with captions down the middle. The text is organized as a table with one row per left hand picture. Right-hand pictures are in-line with the text. Tuesday, July 25  In the afternoon I went through the slides and picked fifty good ones for a highlights page. New scheme for pictures. Instead of putting thumbs.25 and thumbs.6.25 into DigestedPictures, I'll put them in physpics.com/... Then they will be visible while viewing pages before putting them to the web. But this requires getting rid of the JPGs already there. All photos that were in websrc/.../Korea2006/pix are now part in DigestedPictures/2006-Korea (where all displayed pictures are). Wednesday, July 26 Arising early, I did captions for a third of the selected pictures. They are now listed as "Highlights" on the pictures page. Every Wednesday is outing day for Summer Campus at Korea University. Today's outing was scheduled for Everland, but rain forced a change to Lotte World. This place aspires to combine Coney Island, Disneyland, the Mall of the Americas, Madison Square Garden, Neiman-Marcus, a Trump Hotel, Sear's, the National Museum, and a shopping mall. It does pretty well. The place is at least a quarter of a kilometer wide and twice that in length. (Google has it right on the edge of two images. These coordinates show it in the upper left corner of the map.)
For a couple of rides I made myself an honorary 55-year-old. It worked out fine. The World Monorail was just a pleasant tour around the venue. The Jungle Adventure turned out to be like the Raging Rapids at Kennywood, but far tamer. We got splashed only a few drops. The French Revolution turned out to be a full-blown steel rooller coaster. It was exhilarating. After that I wanted a show that would be tamer, so I picked the Dynamic Theater in expectation of a Disney 3-D theatre where they shake the theatre as a kid picks it up and then mice run through the crowd. Nope. It turned out to be a gigantic roller-coaster simulator. The screen showed us plunging through a strange world and the rows of seats jerked us around appropriately. Not as intense as the roller coaster, though. Walking away from the roller coaster, I felt a tightness on the left side of my neck. Yup, my camera strap.   ) is
a bunch of water spouts, clever lighting, fire
flares, and various bizarre shapes that moved up, down, and around. The
Garden Stage offered
some singing and dancing; I watched the kids for a while and moved on.
The Magic Theatre show was competent. Curiously neither the magician
nor his blond assistant were Koreans. In one illusion the girl balanced
atop a single pole. It got more interesting when the pole pierced
through and she dropped six inches. Somehow she survived long enough to
disappear a couple of times. The World
Carnival was a great parade of all sorts of performers and
musicians. Everybody in fancy costumes.We ended the day with shopping. Lacking interest, I announced a plan to return home. So we went to the food market and picked out some salmon and other meat which I then carried on the subway back to our refrigerator. Thusday, July 27 Raining so far you can see the rain. I exercised this morning, showered, and then took a short nap which turned out to be an hour. I feel more awake now. (After the treadmill, the scale showed I've resumed losing weight.) Now it's time to finish up the fifty-finest pictures set. And then to make a set I've been thinking of called "Vanishing Point"--all the pictures have strong lines toward a vanishing point. --- I've put out S's lectures and study questions, but not a lick of captions. --- Finally, at 10PM I got around to finishing the captions I had thought I'd do earlier. Everyone, including me, has trouble getting me to do what I ought. Friday, July 28 Had a pretty good day. In the morning I finished up the collection of pictures having strong vanishing points. And in the afternoon I did my long threatened map of campus based on satellite imagery. Now we are off to dinner with the President of Korea University. It's raining (again) so S is hoping for a bus ride. Not very likely, I'd say. --- Indeed, there was no bus and we had to walk down. Dinner was well worth the walk. It was spectacular and featured western dishes while offering a variety of Korean dishes--including kimchee, of course. Again they served the centennial KU-labeled wine: French wine instead of Korean because KU now has global aspirations. President Euh came and talked with us at our table. He is very proud of what the University has accomplished and not shy in talking about it. There was no bus home either, but they did announce that the faculty will have bus rides home from campus in the evening; regular campus shuttle service has ended for the summer. Saturday, July 29 This morning I exercised and did chores and it got to be 11. But I have little that I want to accomplish on this website. I did want to put Susan's family letters up, and now they are there. This afternoon we are attending a show (Nanta) and visiting GAP--Gee, Another Palace. --- We did go to see Nanta. It is pretty good. And especially so in that it has very little dialog. What dialog it had they did in English, so it was especially good for us. Mainly it is a percussion show, but there is lots of other going on. The basic "plot" is that the performers are the cooking staff of a restaurant and they have to prepare a wedding feast for 6 o'clock. A clock stage left shows that it is 4:50 and the clock runs throughout the show to heighten the suspense. (This was a bit unfortunate for me because I kept watching the clock and realizing that it was unlikely to be a three hour show; indeed, it was just about half that.) Various kitchen objects become percussion instruments. Chopping vegetables was especially fun because the real object seemed to be just how messy they could make the stage. After the show I objected to our planned visit to a palace on the basis that I had seen enough old Korean stuff. So I suggested we go to the Agriculture Museum we had passed on the way from the subway to the theater. It turned out to be a great museum, even though it was--sure enough--full of old Korean stuff. I got a more firm understanding of when the bonze and iron ages and added them to the chart at the end of Week3. We vegged out in the evening--S reading a Tom Clancy novel and I channel surfing. We get over 30 channels in almost a dozen languages: Korean, Chinese, Japanese, American, Russian, Australian, British, French, German, Italian. Some channels shift languages with the clock. Some offer subtitles in one or more languages. Some channels offer American shows with the dubbing right on top of the original sound. You get the start of the American version and then a bass voice in German blots it out. Sunday, July 30 This morning S graded and I exercised before napping. This afternoon S went to a Buddhist temple for a session of meditation and a lecture for foreigners. She enjoyed herself, although the half-hour of seated meditation was, "Very long." Menawhile, I finally resumed work on an oyts paper. I did a new outline and discovered that it was pretty much the same as an earlier version. This is a good sign that I know what I want to do. The hangups now come as I try to formalize concepts that I have just verbalized so far. You can watch the paper as it evolves. We had sunlight in the latter part of the afternoon, so I took some more balcony shots. |
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