Transducers 2005

Well from June 4th through June 10th I was in Seoul, South Korea for Transducers 2005. I had a poster presentation. What this means is that I wrote a paper for the proceedings and for the conference I made a poster that summarized my paper and stood in front of it for 3 hours to answer questions from other participants in the conference.

Our lab had 10 or so papers at the conference so we had those people plus the professors there with us. The group with the students got their a day early which allowed us to do some touring around Seoul for one day. Here is a couple of the picture that I got from there. The first is of the king palace are. Please don't ask me to explain everything because I have fogotten now.



The second is of the king's private garden.



I will not post any food pictures but I will leave it like this I was happy to get back to Japanese food. The food in Korea is very spicy. After more than a few meals did I come away with a burnt out mouth. The best way to describe some of the spices was that they continued to get hotter you eat more. There more several dishes there that I liked such as the yakiniku, you are given raw beef, a grill and some spices. You do the rest. The bubinbi is much better than what you can get in Japan. Those were the two dishes I liked the best along with one trip to TGIF's (one of those chains) where I got the first club sandwich that I have had in over a year or maybe 2. Sendai is not big enough to get those type of chains up here, if I was in Tokyo I would have no problem finding those types of restaurants.

Funny stories from Korea.

The first is that on the day that my group was out sight seeing twice I had young children come up to me and say hello. The first time that it happened I was not expecting it and the little girl started yelling hello at me until I turned around and greeted her. What struck me as odd is for the amount of time that I have been in Japan that has maybe happended to me twice and never by young children, while in one outing in Seoul it happened to me twice.

The second funny/interesting story was of my name tag at the conference. My name tag looked something like this.

Andrew Randles

Tohoku University
Japan

Now this is be worn by a 6 foot 2 ish guy with blond hair and blue eyes (see picture on side) and two or three people said to me, "You are not from Japan, are you?" I got a kick out of this, as did my lab members.

I should say the conference itself was very good and I had a good time. I met several interesting people and went to several interesting presentations.