The first three days - a re-cap

There's so much to be writing about now, I think a condensed version of the last week pre-blog is in order. So rather than writing a novel about the last week, a few highlights...

Tuesday was the great sending-off from Sea-Tac...the adventure begins with a total alarm clock failure and frantic last-minute packing (old hat to me anyway...) Luckily I've given myself two hours of lead time to get to the airport, so I have plenty of time to check in. I tell the agent I'm checking three bags - bad news. It's going to cost me some ridiculous amount of money for the extra bag, enough for me to temporarily modify the laws of physics and bring my bags down to two. I get a call from Will Damon who is there at the gate to bid me farewell, orange vest and all. Jim Diers appears from somewhere and we get on the plane to SFO...

On the plane in SFO I find that I somehow have "economy plus" status - yeah, that extra legroom you had two years ago? Feel free to buy it back now. As we pull into position for takeoff, I try to picture what it was like flying over in 1981 on that big Northwest Orient 747 that my grandfather, then an airline mechanic, had personally readied for our flight. The extra legroom is nice - it makes flying right by Seattle again on the way up a little less painful. 12 hours later I arrive bleary-eyed into a very wet Incheon, S. Korea, get into the country without any problems, and sleep most of the way to Anyang.

Day 2....

My first day at work is pretty straightforward - all I have to do is attend a conference on Livable Cities and manage to stay awake through six hours of speakers. It's all actually pretty interesting - livable cities is of course the common theme, from the perspective of Korea, the U.S., the U.K., and Japan. And they have these cool little translator devices that make understanding Korean and Japanese much easier. I receive what seems like 300 business cards and try to remember who gave them to me.

As is often the case, the reception afterward made for the highlight of the evening. The food is superb, and I get my first introduction to soju. Again, livable cities provides hours of fun. After many a toast in the name of LC it's definitely time for bed. Oh, wait, no...it's not. In Korea, the evening rarely ends with dinner...there's at least a "second time" (beers and fruit, dried fish, and the like), and if you're lucky, there's a "third time," i.e. a few rounds of karaoke (there's a Korean word for it but it's escaping me now...). I managed a couple glasses of OB before the jet lag ends the party for me...

Day 3...

Second day of the Livable Cities conference...Jim "Mr. Neighborhoods" Diers gives a rousing talk on the power of the Fremont Troll, Hideki Koizumi further delves into Machizukuri (village-making), and Prof. Carmona tells of the redemption of Birmingham, which in the 60's was given the honor of being Britain's first car-friendly city. Fortunately, it's what keeps us urban planner types in business, and they've since re-created the town to be people-friendly once again.

I think the highlight of the day was seeing the giant troll up on the projector screen, and being alone in knowing what on earth it was doing there.