Power Monger

Since my first work trip three and a half years ago, I found myself Tuesday a second time arriving into Seoul, South Korea. The first trip had amounted to a three day long low point in a three week tour of Asia, not unpleasant but perhaps a tad dull compared to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tokyo and China. Expectations this time around were not necessarily much higher, as the entirety of trip #2 is spent in industrial Dangjin instead of bright blinking Seoul.

Other than my already diminutive butt now resembling a pancake after too many consecutive long airplane hauls, the total 17-hour journey from Zürich to Frankfurt to Seoul transpired without mishap. Lufthansa opted for Korean fare over Schnitzel in-flight, so I tried the Bi Bim Bap (simply for the name alone), fairly tasty ground beef and vegetables mixed with rice which I adorned with a healthy dollop of garlicky Korean chili paste. I avoided the pre-packaged kimchi, however, and later gratefully received a Western in-flight breakfast, anticipated to be my last fermented-cabbage-free meal for some time. After rendezvousing at the airport with my previously-arrived Swiss technical colleague--traveling for work in Asia for six weeks with his wife--a mere two hour bus ride deposited us in Dangjin.

In a case of the blind leading the blinder, my company sent the new marketing guy (me)--as yet officially untrained on our products and studying the petroleum market for all of five months--to a Korean power plant to give a technical seminar to other 15 other power plant prospects. Did you catch what power plants have in common with petroleum? That’s right, nothing. Except a new market opportunity for us. So arriving Wednesday morning with some scattered info and not one presentation slide prepared, I only needed to prepare a two hour technical talk, final copy for submission first thing Thursday morning and seminar Friday; my technical colleague plans only to fiddle with our product in the lab for a few days, no help on the seminar. No sweat. I arrived wielding an outsized weapon already paying huge dividends while conducting business in Europe--you guessed it, English as the mother language. Thus I lounge now in the power plant Thursday afternoon, mission accomplished and blog authoring. My best blogging minutes this year come during downtime at customer sites (a la Vado, Italy).

So this power plant is monstrously HUGE (the pic above is about 1/8 of it), a cool site especially upon arrival after crossing a miles-long dam. Our hotel in rural industrial Korea is not quite as cool, but not terrible. The hot water is hot, the cold water is tasty. I’m not sleeping on a bamboo mat, although I wondered when we checked in. English out here is nearly non-existent, which I didn’t remember being the case nearly so much in Seoul. We’re resorting to more pointing, gesturing and shrugging than usual and even our hosts’ English is marginal at best (although I now know painfully how that feels with German). The Korean countryside feels relatively still rather crowded, a hodgepodge of unkempt small towns plastered with chaotic blinking advertising, broken up by enormous industrial sites (a Hyundai factory is the largest single manufacturing facility I’ve ever seen, miles long) and the remaining land patches divided into ponds of shallow standing water and mud for rice farming. Korean culture feels to me like a paradoxical mix of high- and low-tech with an inexplicable childlike quality just below the surface.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post when things really get interesting...as we strap on the feed bag.