On 1st September I boarded the aircraft at Zurich Airport, heading for Incheon International Airport in Korea, stopping in Dubai. Roughly 15 hours aboard the plane, followed by a three hours Bus ride to Chungju and another five minutes by taxi. Final destination: Grand Hotel Chungju. That was the plan, and despite some communication issues it worked quite well – there I went straight to bed just before midnight, exhausted but excited.

Just arrived

The morning came way too early, but the bus to the fab didn’t wait but left at 8am sharp. At breakfast I met the first colleagues from Centrotherm and also Tamara from GP Solar who’d be introducing me to alot of things on the first day, too many to remember. The next day she was already off to her holidays. There were so many things to see and learn and almost all of them turned out to be quite different from what I had been expecting.
Exhausting eleven hours later I was back at the hotel and tried to overcome the jetlag, and although I wasn’t overly successful I managed to get up the next morning in time for breakfast.

Yongsan Electronic Market

Weekend already! Paolo, Xavier and I had planned to pay Seoul a visit, more precisely Yongsan Electronic Market where you can find pretty much everything from cameras to huge LCD screens. Not everything is a bargain but sometimes you can save some 10-20% compared to European prizes. While I was saving my money for another visit Xavier left Seoul with more than a million Won less but with a (hopefully) brandnew EOS 500d plus two lenses and other things.

Lost in Translation…

After a long day of walking around we went down town to a place called “Garten Bier” – a homage to Oktoberfest in Munich and Bavarian beer gardens, only indoors and somehow misspelled … was fun anyway and one of Chungju’s highlights was ticked off the list.

A story about Kimchi and Gaegogi

Seriously, who invented this stuff?? Kimchi is the main ingredient of Korean food – unfortunately. Everything tastes like Kimchi … so far I can’t see myself becoming a fan of the Korean cuisine any time soon. To make it worse, ordering some meet always leaves this doubt whether your eating the advertised beef or maybe the dog you petted the other day (for all you hard-boiled nonbelievers out there – check out this poor fella).