Brr… Seoul is having a cold snap. There is ice cascading down from the hotel lobby’s rock garden waterfall and it is snowing outside. We were expecting spring weather closer to a balmy 45 degrees.
We are lucky to have made it to this bitterly cold place. The Cathay Pacific agent in Melbourne managed to adjust our flight from Australia to Hong Kong but cancel each and every subsequent ticket for us for the rest of the year. We found this out when we showed up for our flight in Hong Kong and then spent the next two hours with the desk agent trying to get us on standby for our flight. She left us with lots of bowing and a heavily accented admonition that we check again with the American Airlines desk later in the week to make sure the cancellation was deleted.
Well, sure enough, Derrell just spent a few hours on the phone back to the AA desk and the manager there got our tickets reissued under a new record locator. We’ll see how well those work over the next few days.
We are here in Seoul for the IETF conference and, as usual, it is fully wired. We were able to make the long distance phone call over a voice-over-ip demo that terminated in the States, and thus actually use the 1-800 number. Oh, geeks are so wonderful!
I’m typing this in the lobby cafe with a Korean flute and piano player playing delicate music in the background. The hotel is fully wired for wireless internet courtesy of Cisco. Four guys are sitting here with competing laptops, chatting about the pros and cons of software, hardware and Internet protocols using billions of acronymns some newly invented this week.
We’ve been to traditional Korean Barbeque restaurant, a traditional Chicken Ginseng Soup restaurant, a point at the food bowl food court meal with many varieties of kimchi, seaweed and noodles showing up, and finally a few cop-out meals at T.G.I.Fridays.
This is all after our introduction to what we deem some of the most overpriced hotel menus on the planet. Our first meal at 11 PM was at the Westin Chosun O’Kim’s Irish Pub (get it?) landed us with one order of nachos and one glass of the cheapest beer on the menu (Derrell had water). The final total? 44,000 Won which equates to approximately $40 USD. We remind ourselves to check all menus in the future very thoroughly. And what did we find out? Both the Lotte Hotel and the Westin Hotel are outrageously overpriced. Lotte Hotel… cheaper than the Westin has the low price of 7,000 Won for the cheapest beer on the menu, forget any appetizers.
We did find that if we went local, we could get decent meal prices, but everyone at the conference was bitching. It’s darn cold outside.
Being a conference, the nights went a bit crazy. One ended up at a GI bar on a Sunday night of a three day weekend. That was almost like visiting Bremerton on a Friday night. Yikes. There are over 30,000 Army-ites stationed here and it shows. Another evening ended up at a hostess bar. This equates to paying for very expensive drinks for a pretty female to talk and fawn over you. Needless to say a few of the guys ended up about 320,000 Won poorer. But it was a true Korean experience and part of the businessman culture. (Someone told us it goes something like this: Businessman lays out much money showing his cohorts his wealth. Businessman revels in the attention. Businessman shows his moral supiority and doesn’t (normally) take the woman home afterwards. Our response: Huh.)
My newfound knowlege is that Soju (very similar to sake) is very bad for engineers. It seems to keep them out until 5 AM revealing very repressed individuals let loose from their acronymns.
From here we are back over to Hong Kong for one night where it is warmer, then we are off to New Delhi were it is much warmer. That is an odd realization as I watch the snow drifting outside as the words ‘expired certificates… jabber.org root certificates, yep, lovely… pki is the wave of the future… the logotype RFC was approved… hot damn.. great isn’t it?… the specification of how to embed a picture in your certificate…’ Geek in space.
