Onward to ISCA 2008 in Beijing

It's off to ISCA (the International Symposium on Computer Architecture), one of the main conferences in my research area; this year held in Beijing.

Hae Mul Sundubu in the Seoul/Incheon airport where I had a brief layover.

"We sincerely welcome you with hospital service, ..."

The "bird's nest" building for the '08 Summer Olympics.

Another crazy building.

A He/ Nan/ dinner with my student and his parents.

62 Hours in Seoul

So I ended up spending about 62 hours in Korea just after New Year's. I'm teaching for the Korea program again this year, but via video. They wanted us to go spend a little time there to meet the new students and give a lecture or two.

It was funny being reminded of this again: the 24-hour go channel.

Kimbap. Can't seem to find good kimbap in Atlanta.

Random banchan.

Sundubu jiggae. Yum.

We went to some tofu-specialty restaurant for lunch.

Much larger banchan selection.

My tofu soup. It was a fresh form of tofu that was almost kind of curdled in texture.

Dunkin donuts, but Korean varieties that you can't get in the US. Peanut something or other and the green tea "chewisty".

Kishore got pizza for the Korean students on saturday afternoon. This was a funny variety: "seafood island".

Tteok gook. (Rice cake soup)

Some kind of beef soup (at the airport).

Taipei to Seoul

End of the trip...

Some kind of pork noodle soup in the Taipei airport.

Airplane food on the flight back to Seoul.

That night we wandered over to Myeongdong, which is a pretty popular shopping district in Seoul which Sue had not seen yet.

We just chose a restaurant at random.

"Salad", which seems to often be cabbage based in Korea.

The main course. Some sort of *really* spicy meat (I think it was chicken) with rice, a few piece of tteok (glutenous rice cake) and two tater tots on the side (huh?).

We also stopped off for some ice cream. This was really weird as the "toppings" (or underings?) for this included fruit, beans, and tomatoes!!! (I guess they're technically fruits, but it tasted pretty odd with ice cream.)

And that's that! Except for the flight back to the US (airport food in Seoul and airplane food later), that concludes our Asian culinary adventure!

Seoul to Beijing: The Trip Begins!

So after Sue's DevCon trip in Las Vegas, she flew to Seoul where I met her at the airport, and then from there we flew to Beijing. I'm only going to be posting food items here. If you want the full non-food report, you'll have to go to thelohs.net where all of that stuff will eventually end up.

First food item: Korean food at the Incheon airport while killing time waiting for our flight (Sue arrived at like 5am local time and our flight wasn't until the afternoon).

Pumpkin porridge for me.

Sundubu for Sue.

Pearl milk tea in Beijing. Tapioca was a little too soft for my liking. Also could have been colder.

Wall-side kabob vendor. We just ate a few lamb skewers as a snack, but they were dirt cheap. 0.5RMB each, which is like 7 cents!

The skewers weren't particularly large, but how much do you expect for 7 cents?

For dinner, we just went into a random restaurant on a side street. First major test of Gabe's forgotten Mandarin. We ended up ordering way too much food.

Left: sweet and sour pork (I think the waitress recommended this to us because we're foreigners... grrr). Right: diced chicken (ji ding) with bell peppers and spicy red peppers. This dish had some heat to it.

Whole fish in a brown sauce with bamboo shoots and mushrooms. The food was all very tasty. We were the only lao~ wai\ (foreigners) in the joint. For way too much food, it only cost us about $8USD. Can't complain.