It's a beautiful campus nestled in a densely forested area --most trees are deciduous, and include locust trees (one of my favorites), fruit trees, and maples. There are also lots of vines I can't identify. There's a little trail from my dormitory to the natural sciences building, which is convenient and a nice "commute".
A few pics showing my last few days:
PAL, which is the Pohang Accelerator Lab, was our first stop on Thursday morning. The accelerator is a circular tube (~250 m distance) in which electrons are accelerated in a waveform, releasing energy in the form of high-intensity photons. They can use the resulting light in a smorgasbord of instrumental techniques, which are placed at outlets tangent to the accelerator.
This is an example of an instrumental station along the accelerator tube (the accelerator runs all the time, and it's in that bright green area in this pic)
Here's a smaller demo version of the accelerator setup ---I didn't hear what the tour guide was saying in this part, unfortunately, but if you're an interested physicist and reading this, please comment!
This is the part of the setup for the "fourth generation" accelerator they're currently building that allows them to use a straight design rather than circular... it allows them to leave out the giant magnet that's required for acceleration of electrons...
This is blurry, but that giant metal thing is a monochromator ---it's HUGE!
Some of the many publications that have come out of this facility...
We met one professor who worked with an AFM:
And here's a schematic of all the different techniques that run using the PAL light source.
We went to lunch at a vegetarian buffet (yay!) --it was tasty, and I got to try some funky foods without worrying about whether they contained meat. I'm kind of up in the air about whether I should continue my vegetarianism... at this point, it's a hassle, and I'm throwing away meat in a lot of cases so it's just going to waste. There were some neat things at the buffet though: lotus flower seed soup, steamed aloe, and all kinds of odd mushrooms. I took a picture of the light in the room because I thought it was neat.
The architecture of the building was really lovely, too. You can see the curved roof and the inset wood pieces around the door. Through the door, a family was seated a traditional table.
That evening, we walked through an area of town called Insadong, which is set aside as a traditional Korean area. They have souvenirs and traditional foods, and almost everything is written in Hangul. You can see the full moon in the background also ---very nice!
We returned to the hotel along the creek I mentioned in an earlier post, and saw some little fish swimming in the creek.
A few of us continued on to a market in another section of Seoul, where we saw some squid swimming around in a tank, ready to be eaten.
The area was very nice---lots of brand name stores and expensive gifts.
The following morning, I traveled to Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS). The campus is absolutely beautiful --as I mentioned, there are tons of plants, and there were some really great cumulus clouds surrounding our little valley yesterday.
The office spaces are small in our lab, but Taehyoung gave me a desk (on the right) in his office ---very nice!! I didn't know he played the guitar, and I'm hopeful that he'll play a little for me at some point. He and his students are extremely busy, and I feel a little bad for not being in the lab every second since I arrived. They eat together for lunch and dinner, and stay very late in the lab. They're mostly very shy, but also very nice and helpful. Cheong Min and Seong Ueon are graduate students (first year MS students), and Chi Hue, Kyeong Hun, and Ja Yeong are all undergraduate students working in the lab. The names are unusual for me, so they're hard to remember (I think it's pretty rude to forget names --faux pas number 155!)
This is the natural sciences building where our lab and office are:
And here's my dorm building (in the center). It's a dorm for English teachers, so there are all kinds of international students, including one from Pennsylvania and another from Halifax I met Friday night. It's pretty quiet in my hall so far, but the room is nice and I have a kitchen to use.
The trail between my dorm and office/lab is gorgeous. Friday night as I walked back from the natural sciences building, there was a pickup soccer game going on down the hill. If I get the guts up and keep running, maybe I'll go join in!
There are lots of these HUGE grasshoppers --both dead and alive-- around. The bodies are maybe 4-5 cm, and the antennae are even longer.
This morning while strolling around, I found some pretty funny signs.... this one was on the side of a bus. If you have any idea what it means, please don't tell me. I'd rather keep guessing... "Oops, I put my dead fish on a rope"? Or maybe, "oops, I caught a dead fish"?
While not as good, I would like to know what they mean here...
...and finally, have you....
For what I'm not sure, but it might be a good question.
There's a nice lake on campus with a few koi and some benches to sit.
There are a few large ducks sitting next to the lake, and this outdoor venue is used for concerts during the school year. I saw a poster for Muse on a billboard, but I think it must have been somewhere in Seoul.
Another nice building on the campus:
This school houses an international student body, and has a strong program in language teaching and business. These signs are around campus with different flags from all the countries represented by the students.
Taehyoung says that there are tons of trails to hike into the mountains surrounding the school, and I think this might be one of the trailheads. Very picturesque! Further up the road, I met a cyclist... I think there are some good rides around here.
This morning, I went to the grocery store with Taehyoung. He helped me buy a few things so I can make myself some dinners and breakfast. I couldn't find coffee grounds, but I'll keep looking! He might have an extra bag he can give me, too. In this pic of the seafood section (very fresh ---Taehyoung called this store something like "Wal-Mart"), you can see the WHOLE OCTOPUS in the middle on the right. I'm not showing the tank full of (I think) rock fish and tank with squid.
For all you plant geeks out there ---any ideas what this thistle-like flower is? The bloom shows up a little bluer than it is in real life.
Here are Seong Ueon and Choeng Min, the two graduate students in my lab, at their desks (which are within the lab).
And one last pic of the lab space ---hoods in the background, which I'll be using next week to make some reagents for our chemical analyses, and the sprayer we use to clean out the cloudwater collectors (but look like we're doing something much cooler like collecting ghosts).
Hopefully, tomorrow I'll do a little work in the lab to get our particulate volume monitor (measures liquid water content) working correctly, and then I'll go explore our area a little more.
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