IUFRO Conference - Seoul, Korea (3)

Fortunately, I was not the lone representative from University of Copenhagen at the conference. Several of my Ph.D colleagues and professors were also there presenting and/or organizing technical sessions. It was a great chance to learn more about their work and to get to know some of them out of the office.

I got lucky also that some of my colleagues are part of a larger project researching reliance on income from forest resources in various developing countries. They have a whole group that has been working for years on a very large study. I some how feel into their evening dinner plans one night and got treated (though I had intended to pay for myself from the start!) to a FANTASTIC Korean dining experience. At the beginning of the meal there were some musicians that played some really gorgeous music.














Soon there after the table was full of many many different little bowls and plates with a seemingly endless amount of yummy stuff. It was delicious, and my first real experience with Korean food other than BBQ (which I had on another night while in Seoul, also an experience not to be missed!).

The dinner was followed by a few hours of karaoke, which is done like in Japan - a bunch of friends in a small room, very cozy. I convinced a few colleagues to go, promising them it would be MORE FUN THAN THEY THINK! I am happy to report that I was indeed right and they found they really had a great time.

That was a bit of a late night, which was tough because the next day was the In-Congress tour. We had to be on buses from our hotels between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning for a day out in various forests in Korea. I was on a health and forests tour which was really great. We got to see how Koreans cultivate shiitake mushrooms, drink locally made cold honey tea, and try out a sweet, chilled pine needle juice drink - which was surprisingly tasty and some locally grown corn on the cob that was, strangely enough, really sticky and chewy.

At our first stop I took a shot of this really very sort of Asian walking path design in the forest.














As I wrote in my post #1 about the conference it was rainy rainy rainy in Korea the whole week I was there and this day was no exception. Our group got pretty lucky until the end of the day. We had about a 20 min uphill walk to the top of a small mountain to see the oldest Ginkgo Biloba tree in the East. The ENTIRE walk up it poured down HARD! Fortunately, I was able to sneak under the umbrella of an absolutely sweet and very interesting forest policy professor from Iran.

Also fortunately, Buddha rewarded us for our perseverance and the rain let up by the time we got to the tree. So here is me and the tree, which they think is about 1,100 years old. It is 41 meters high and 14 meters around!


















Here's me with the beautiful Yongmusa Temple also at the top of the little mountain. There has been a temple here for over 1000 years, but the reconstructed temple in the 1400s was destroyed by the Japanese army during the Japanese occupation in 1909. The present temple was rebuilt in 1938.














I have no photos from my presentation, but my colleagues and some of the conversations I was in afterward with people who came said that it was interesting. One of my supervisors was the coordinator of the session and he was quite pleased - always a good sign :-)