First Travel Blog

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This is my first travel blog on this website. The idea to start keeping a travel blog came about when I realized that I was sending update emails to my friends and family that basically all said the same things. It was getting really annoying typing the same things over and over again. By keeping this up to date, hopefully this will make it easier for people to get updates of how I am doing.

So I suppose I will just start typing about my current trip and see where this takes me...here goes:

Right now I am on a business trip to South Korea. This is my second visit to Korea in the past 3 months. Without going into too much detail about the nature of this business trip, lets just say that I am working at a nuclear reactor close to the city of Ulsan. The reactor itself is located in the Wolsong region on the coastline of the East Sea (or the Sea of Japan). The city where I am staying is called Gyeongju, which is located 45 minutes west of the reactor along a twisted route through the mountains.

Since this is a business trip, I don't have to worry too much about finding good locations to stay...that is all taken care of AND paid for me. I am staying at the Hilton Hotel in Gyeongju, which is an extremely nice hotel and great staff. I stayed at this hotel during my first trip to Korea, and I consider it my Korean home. In fact, besides my mom's home back in Canada, this is the only other place that I have lived at for longer then a week or 2, so I consider it my second home. I could go on and on about long term stays in a hotel but I will save that for another post.

Ok, thats enough background for now. What I want to talk about is what I have been up too the last few days. On Saturday night, the company I am working for held a Christmas Party. Contractors were invited as well. I was the only employee from my company to attend, so I felt like a important representative of my company.

I asked my co-worker, Ping, to start his nightshift a bit earlier so that I could duck out and get back to the Hilton, were the party was being held. I got to the party a bit late, and most of the food was gone, but I still managed to get a bit. I happened to sit at a table with a bunch of contractors from other companies who I work with. Thankfully there was plenty of mashed potatoes left (one of my favorite foods) so I had a few helpings of that. Probably the last time I will have mashed potatoes for the next few months...at least until February when my shift here ends.

They had a raffle at the party and I was fortunate enough to win a 320GB external hard drive...a pretty good win since South Korea has some of the best downloading speeds in the world.

Everyone was getting smashed at the party, and no one cared about how expensive it was. I was dropping so much coin on booze it was nuts. Its great to see coworkers in a social setting, and it really adds to the bond us as Canadians share as we try to live and work in this foreign land. A bunch of people had plans to go to Ulsan to keep the party going, so I jumped on one of the buses that people had rented out for the night. Eventually I ended up at a bar called W-Garden in downtown Ulsan. I had been to this bar during my last trip to see a coworker guest dj for a night. The bar looked a lot more tame this time around, more lights were on and there were less speakers.

5 of us ended up going to the dance club upstairs. We started tearing up the dance floor and the Koreans must have been scared off because soon we were the only ones dancing. Everyone else has moved to the sides or to the bar. We didn't care though (mainly because we were so drunk). I had so much space so I was dancing so wide and taking up a lot of room. I was literally running from wall to wall of the dance floor, it was so much fun. 2 small stages were set up at the front that had just a small enough gap to be able to jump over, so obviously we were all jumping from stage to stage. It was a sad moment for me when the music stopped and the bar was shutting down.

Outside the bar, a few of us stumbled around trying to figure out what to do next. I found a bunch of other Canadians but I was way to drunk to have any kind of a meaningful conversation. We found our way to something like a construction yard with the roads all torn up and large piles of dirt. We climbed up on the dirt piles and all I can say is that my shoes were full of pebbles the next day. The setting really reminded me of the environments from the videogame Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory at the parts in Korea. We ate at a macdonalds, the first macdonalds I have eaten at in Korea, and the sausage and egg McMuffin I had was glorious! It tasted exactly the same as back in Canada!

We didn't make it back to the Hilton Hotel until 6:30am, and daylight was starting to break. Overall it was a great Korean Christmas Party!!

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