Four of my colleagues and I were invited to Seoul National University to give talks and training on Dataverse. Our primary host was Wonsuk Lee, who arranged every detail impeccably. He has big plans for Dataverse at SNU, and we all hope that this is just the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership!
When you fly direct to Korea from Boston, you go over the Arctic Circle.
Arriving at SNU we were very excited to see our agenda, partially in Korean.
Wonsuk kicked off the day. Then Stefano, Gustavo, Sonia, and I gave talks (see the agenda above).
We fielded some questions. Among other things, SNU is interested in using Dataverse for hosting course content.
We took a little break for pictures and a walk to see the nearby mountain and a variety of campus buildings.
Upon our return we moved across the hall to a computer for hands on training by Sonia
Stephen finished the day with a talk on creating bug reports and change requests.
We briefly met developer Jin Kim, whom we would be spending a lot of time with the next day. He and Wonsuk are the ones installing the Dataverse software.
That evening we settled on eating at Pig Restaurant 2, which was fabulous. The owner, Leon (sp?), even cooked for us at our table. He even has a third restaurant.
The next day we had a number of meetings but the only pictures I took were of food.
Wonsuk, Jin and I installed Dataverse using dataverse-ansible and then the three of us and Gustavo and Stephen worked through some configuration, such as moving from local file storage to S3 and a local database to AWS RDS.
We had some excellent sushi for lunch.
After lunch we discussed more about SNU’s vision for their installation of Dataverse. Stefano gave a talk about our plans for restructuring and re-architecting the code.
Wonsuk brought us to a restaurant that made us feel at home since is served excellent Texas-style BBQ.
He also taught us a lot about the Korean language. Here’s my name in Korean.
The next day we had free time to roam around the city. From our hotel rooms we could see the North Seoul Tower. We decided to walk up the mountain to investigate.
There was a wall of photo booth pictures in the tower. We decided to contribute our own.
The view from the tower was impressive.
There were locks everywhere.
We took a cable car down.
We split into two groups. Gustavo, his wife April, and I went to the Jogyesa temple and then the Gyeongbokgung palace, where we saw the changing of the guards.
Near the folk art museum we met up with Wonsuk, who had just given a talk in the area.
We got a view of the traditional houses from above.
Wonsuk bought us some street food! We had bungeoppang (“carp bread”), gyeran-ppang (egg bread), and hotteok (sweet pancake). We had skipped lunch so it really hit the spot.
For dinner we had bibimbap.
Then we had excellent VIP seats provided by Wonsuk for a show called Nanta. Lots of cooking, percussion, and laughs!
The next day we had a wrap-up meeting, and then Wonsuk took us around for sightseeing and lunch.
We walked along the Cheonggyecheon stream.
We saw the statue of Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who fought off the Japanese navy.
We saw the statue of King Sejong, who introduced hangul, the script used in modern Korean.
Wonsuk provided a fabulous, multi-course traditional Korean meal that I don’t have any pictures of!
After lunch, Sonia finally found a Dunkin.
We had to say goodbye to Wonsuk at this point so we paused for a picture.
Jin took us to a market where we enjoyed some shopping and street food.
The next day I met up with a friend in Seoul, who took me all over town, including a nice park along the river.
She stuffed me with food, including Patbingsu (shaved ice).
Late at night, Gustavo, Stefano, and I decided we needed to try the real KFC, Korean Fried Chicken. It did not disappoint!
I’ll end with the gifts that Wonsuk and SNU gave us. They are a reminder of the amazing amount of hospitality we were shown.
As I said above, I think this is just the beginning. We hope to meet some SNU folks at the community meeting in Braga, Portugal in June. I walked Jin through joining chat.dataverse.org so I’m sure we’ll keep the conversation rolling there and elsewhere.
I’d like to give a huge thanks to Wonsuk and SNU for inviting us to visit them in Korea. The warmth and generosity we were shown will never be forgotten.
p.s. If you’d like to see even more pictures, please check out the the post on my personal blog!