The End of the Drought: The Grenawalts and Walker's Arrival

I had lasted the drought.  It had been a month without my wife and over half a year since I had less than 6,000 miles between my family and me.  However, there was a storm brewing to the east.  Kate's arrival from her trip to the U.S. came just one day following my conference in South Korea.  Our reunion served as the perfect primer for the week.  Jonce, Katie Jean, Joe, and my mom were scheduled to land in Japan just three days after Kate.  Over the course of one week I planned on giving them a Japanese-culture crash course.  Yes....rain was coming....I looked up at the sky and I welcomed the downpour with open arms.

Kate and I were running to the International Arrivals area of Terminal 1 when I hear "Seth!" come from my left.  To my surprise I looked over to see an unkept, possibly homeless man sitting down against the wall.  How did this man know my name and how did he get in the airport?!  Well, upon further inspection it was Jonce...with one of the gnarliest beards I had ever seen.   Shortly after seeing Jonce, we noticed Katie Jean emerged from the crowd looking cheerful as always. 

Photobucket
Lets get something straight, the whole reason why I grew a beard in the first place was for people to differentiate between Jonce and I more easily.  Now I have to get new glasses or something.  Plus, now I have beard envy!

Shortly thereafter we cruised over to Terminal 2 for my mom's flight arrival.  After a short while I watched Joe and my mother's face completely light up as they entered the arrival area.  Truly a hallmark moment.  When I asked my mother about her most memorable moment in Japan she said "Seeing you at the airport when we arrived and hugging you neck!"  There is a reason why countless movies capture this moment of arrival, it's magical...  So, after a brief reunion we made our way to the Japanese utility vehicle I rented for the big pickup. 

Photobucket
Excited to be in Japan and in the rental car!  Plenty of room for everyone and their respective luggage. 

Everyone was in good spirits, which made it much easier to deal with my stupidity as I drove onto the toll road (wrong road) on the way to Tokyo (wrong direction).  800 yen and 30 minutes later we were back on the right route as it started to rain.  Here at the Hosting Enterprise of Rubberneckers Organized by Walkers in Japan (HEROW-Japan ...possibly the worst acronym ever) we slowly ease you into eastern cuisine.  So for their first meal I decided to introduce everyone to Japanese curry at Cocos.  

Photobucket
Yay! I can't read anything, but there are pictures!

This style of curry is always a crowd pleaser.  In fact, Joe instantly feel in love with the pork cutlet curry.  Looking back on all of the food he tried while visiting, he said this was his favorite.  Everybody seemed to really enjoy the curry.  Katie Jean also had an octopus salad that she liked a lot. 

The rest of the rainy drive home was filled with lively conversation as we discussed our big week ahead of us.  Once we got back to the Ninomiya house I showed everyone around and made sure nobody went to bed before 9:00 to help with jet-lag.  It was raining, both literally and figuratively.  I was finally able to spend time with family and I was loving every minute of it.  

Christmas, Big Buddha, conveyor belt sushi, and shopping were on the itinerary for the next day. Much more to come!  

-Seth

Posted in

Korea - Days 4 and 5: See ya Korea

Early on the 4th day both Matt and I awoke bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.  In true Haines fashion, he practiced his speech for the first time just hours before giving it.  Also, in Haines fashion, it turned out great.  I envy his Joe Cool approach to these matters.  If I don't prepare far in advance and stress out about it, it doesn't turn out well. 
 
 Matt pointing to the title of his paper/speech.

The rest of the day was spent dipping in and out of presentations whose subjects tickled my fancy.  Following the final presentation, all of the symposium participants gathered for some closing remarks.  One of the organizers mentioned some statistics about the event.  For example, ISLCT did obtain its objective of "international-ness" through submissions of countries like Korea, Japan, China, United Kingdom, ect.  However, it was interesting to see that nearly 70% (from memory) of the participants hailed from South Korea.  I don't think it was as "international" as they had hoped. 

Quick pic before they took down the symposium banner.

That night Matt and I ate dinner with the guys from Hann Ocean Technologies (Henry and Andreas).  Afterward we walked to a more 'Western' bar to have some celebratory adult beverages, play pool, and throw darts. 

Matt is helping is partner (Henry) to line up the shot.  Andreas is on the left.

I'd rather not disclose how many drinks I had that night (if I could, I would).  We had a great time hanging out with Henry and Andreas and made it back to our hotel safely.

Day 5

I woke up this day with one single goal in mind.  You see, Jeju is a volcanic island with many natural beauties scattered throughout.  However, none of these interested me more than the Manjanggul lava tubes.  Why you ask?  Well, because I'm a dude who daydreams about huge waves of scorching hot lava powering through underground tunnels, reaching temperatures so hot that the rocks themselves melt!  Yeah...that's probably why.

Before we could walk within the vast underground cathedral birthed from fire, we had to go to the airport.  Recall, if you will, the unfortunate welcoming we had to Jeju that was the breaking of Matt's suitcase.  Upon arrival at the airport we tracked down our guy and he brought out Matt's 'like new' luggage.  For our troubles Matt convinced them to let us check into our flight way in advance (this will be important later).  Next we started nailing down the logistics of our quick trip to the lava tubes.

In theory, we could take the hour long bus ride, walk around the lava tubes for a bit, and be back to the airport about 1.5 hours before our flight.  So we went for it.  Since we had no idea what anything/anyone was saying, we relied on the kindness of people to get us around.  We hopped on an airport bus that took us to the main bus terminal.

These statues were outside of the bus terminal.  Creeped out...?

Through some quick communications via map-pointing we were able to 'eeni-meeny-miny-moe' our way onto the correct bus just before it left the bus station (seem familiar...?).  During the ride we were able to see different side of the island, both literally and figuratively.  We got a glimpse of the more low-income areas which reminded me of Mexico in some ways.  A unique aspect of living in Tsukuba is that a low-income area is essentially nonexistent, so I was a little caught off guard.  Another very interesting observation was their farm plots.  

All of their farm land had lava rock walls, and a lot of them.  The rocks were simply stacked on top of each other, no mortar, no nothing.  I thought to my self "They look so fragile, doesn't the wind just blow them over?"  I think wind isn't an issue because their stacking method leaves a lot of holes between rocks.  So, the wind just passes through the holes.  Bada-bing, bada-boom! 
The bus dropped us off right next to a sign that said "Manjanggul: 2 km"  D'oh!  Without hesitation we set off on our mile long walk.   



Apparently most people drive to the lava tubes.  There wasn't much of a shoulder.

Oh, cool. Tetris ahead.  

After about 30 minutes, we finally made it to the lava tubes.  The Manjanggul lava tubes are over 8 miles long, but tourists are only allowed in a 1/2 mile section.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage site because it has some of the best preserved lava tubes in the world as well as some rare features.  

Walking inside is quite surreal.  This room for example seemed like it was excavated for, say, a subway.  In terms of scale, the ceiling in this room was about 30 feet up.  Much like a river canyon, you can see various levels of flow based on the horizontal lines on the walls.

As you might imagine, walking was difficult due to the lava etched floor. 

I find it hard to describe all of the aspects of the lava tubes that made them so cool to me.  So let me just say: "The Manjanggul lava tubes are the cat's meow."  I think that sufficiently gets my point across.  Matt has more photos that I would like to post, but his computer is broken so just check back in a couple of days.    

While taking in the splendor of the lava tubes we lost track of time.  It goes without saying that our antics to get back to the airport were reminiscent of a Charlie Chaplin short.  For the sake of length I will give the condensed version of the story:

A failed attempt to grab a taxi lead to us boarding a very questionable bus.  Matt and I quickly became the only passengers on the obviously outdated bus as it bobbed and weaved through the countryside in an almost chaotic fashion.  There was a moment where I thought he might be taking us to his murdering grounds.  I guess he determined not to kill us as he finally dropped us off at another bus stop.  We eventually got on another bus that took us to the main bus terminal, but we had lost at least 45 minutes and it was not looking good.  

We ended up arriving at the airport about 30 minutes before our international flight was set to depart.  In any other case, at any other airport, we would have been utterly out of luck.  But we weren't out of luck...we had already checked in.  Also, the airport (although international) is quite small.  So, we made it through security and to our terminal in 10 minutes flat.  We had, once again, escaped the clutches of poor punctuality and were on our flight to back to Japan.  See ya, Korea. 

-Seth 

Posted in

Korea - Day 3: Captain Heat MIA

Being the worry wart that I am, I couldn't sleep the night before my presentation.  This meant that I arose before my alarm had a chance to do its job.  I donned my suit, grabbed breakfast, and headed to the conference.  Interestingly, of the 29 other wind energy presentations, there was only one that even remotely related to my work.  It just so happened to be during the earliest time slot as well.  The conference was set up such that for each 20 minute slot, there would be about 5 simultaneous presentations occurring in different rooms.  They were separated into categories such as Wind Energy, Hydrogen, Solar, Biomass, ect.  The first presentation really set the tone for the rest of the symposium...

Ummm...permission to speak freely...?  Thank you. 

To put it simply, I was disappointed with the presentations most of the time.  Perhaps I'm too much of a presentation snob by letting these things eat at my soul.  Maybe my expectations were too high going into this professional, international gathering of scientists and engineers.  Then again, public speaking isn't the forte' of scientists and engineers.  You know what is though, math.  And you can bet they let everybody know with their huge equations that they put up on the screen.  

"Hey man, thanks for putting those huge double integral equations on the screen that it took you months to solve.  Now just give me a couple seconds to decipher the variables and understand their implications...Great, thanks!" 

NO!  In case you didn't pick up on the sarcasm, that is not an effective way to present this stuff!  All of those minuet details are what your technical paper is for.  I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I seriously doubt very many people can process these equations in a matter of seconds.  Not only was there a lot of this big equation business, but almost every other golden rule of public speaking was broken.  So...I cringed as I sat through presentation after presentation of habitual screen reading (back to audience), laser-pointer abuse, and PowerPoint slides that were nothing more than a huge block of text. 

This was from a plenary speech.  And yes, he read that entire block of text for about 2 minutes.  At least he read the English paragraph, not the Chinese.

The main point I want to get across from this (unnecessarily) long rant is this: Now, more than ever, I understand the need for individuals in technical field to take some form of public speaking classes.  Many times there were no questions during the Q&A session because nobody understood what had been happening for the past 15 minutes.  However, on the bright side, this did have two positive consequences.

One good thing about this plethora of poor presentations was that the diamonds in the rough gleamed ever brighter.  This made me especially excited to sit in on a rare lecturer who was articulate.  Namely, the fellas from Hann-Ocean Technologies and their two presentations on Hexifloat and Drakoo.  The company has a great idea for a renewable power generating station that incorporates wind, solar, tidal, and wave energy into one system.  You can check it out by clicking here.  Throughout the conference, we got to know the two representatives quite well (more on that on the new post).


The other pleasant outcome from these presentations was a lack of pressure for mine to be perfect.  It was like in school when I would always try to follow the kid who I knew had the worst presentation.  I would look good in comparison.  Its a time-tested formula that can be seen in high schools everywhere (i.e. attractive girls surrounding themselves with ugly girls).

This contributed to my presentation being, in a word, easy.  Aside from one or two technical difficulties, my lecture went off without a hitch.  The questions that were asked (a sign of comprehension) were answerable so I didn't look like a bumbling idiot in front of everybody.

Standing in front of the oral presentation schedule for the Wind Energy room.

Following my presentation I went upstairs to drop off my computer and unwind before the dinner banquet. 

Big ice sculpture behind desserts.

Waaaaaaay more people showed up to the banquet than I had seen all day.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that dinner was the only thing some people attended. 

Before we could rush to the buffet line (thats how they do banquets in Korea), we watched a 20 minute magic show.



When they announced that we had to sit through a 20 minute magic show before we could eat, I got angry.  Rather, I was getting 'hangry' (hungry-angry) as my brother would say.  However,  I found myself content with the entertainment once it started.  I especially loved that "Inspecter Gadget" was one of their songs.

Matt and I found ourselves seated next to several Japanese people, which felt oddly comforting.  We were able to have great conversations as business cards flew around the table.  The food was absolutely delicious and once we were properly stuffed, went back to our room to relax.

At this point I relished in the peace that comes after completing something you have worked so hard on.  Now I could kick back, truly relax, and help Matt with his presentation the following morning.  He worked on it for the rest of the night while we watch the Asian games (like The Olyimpics, but only Asian countries could participate).

If you are curious about the actual content of my presentation, let me know.  I will try to figure out the best way to send it to you (i.e. PowerPoint with notes, video, ect).  

-Seth

Posted in ,

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)