BBB in Korea

As you all know, my BBB/brother/William/Billy is in Korea till Mid April. Thought i'd share some of his entertaining emails!

Korea is a country comprised of 70% mountains, however, it has a very dense population which means any city there is, has multiple large sky scrapers. Looking over Korea from the plane, it was as I was looking at 10 Chicago's laid out surrounded by about 4 square miles each.

The room I have is nice. I like not so squishy beds, however, this bed feels as if I am laying on a piece of wood. I may have to lay down extra blankets and pillows to lay on. The view is amazing. It overlooks this bay area where a lot of fishing is done. I constantly see boats come and extract nets full of fish from the water.

The money is cool looking. Its shiny. The only coin I have seen is the 100 KWON coin. Everything for sale only goes up by 100 KWON so that would explain that. The prices here are not too expensive, the hotel fancy lunch cost me $15 but places in Yeosu are much cheaper. Apparently  the expensive part will be laundry. I am allowed $30 a week for laundry and apparently that is tough to make.

Last night I went to a Korean Barbecue place. You would use lettuce to place your meats in after cooking them and dipping them in a sauce. It was delicious! Im pretty sure I was eating cow or pig stomach and probably dog but the meets were so tender, juicy, and sweet. The redish looking stuff in the bottom of the picture is Kimchi (sp?). It is basically fermented cabbage with some spice on it. It is one of the most disgusting things I have ever tasted. They make it once a year in a big batch. So that cabbage was probably sitting in a freezer for months.  

At the dinner we were drinking Hite beer and Soju. Soju is liquor made from rice. It is very smooth. Much smoother than any other liquor. Also, it catches up to you. 

January 7^th

Today was my first day at the refinery. I basically sat there, reviewed the general operating manual, P&IDs, and met the people who are a part of the FCC group. Lunch was provided by the refinery. I had potatoes with a carmalized sauce, nasty sprouts (really bad) and white rice (good filler!). Koreans don't believe in drinking during meals so we don't get water until after lunch which really makes it hard to eat dry rice. After lunch we came back to the office and all the lights were off because it was "nap time". People were literally sleeping and snoring with their heads on their desks. It was amusing. On the way back from work we saw a cop car with its lights on, so we let it in the lane we were in. The cop was shocked so I guess this doesn't happen often. The cop then drove about 10 miles behind traffic with its lights on, no one moved over or pulled over. It was odd. For dinner, we all went to a chicken and beer place. I had "case" beer which was pretty good and we also had some sauced chicken, fried chicken, and fries and mozzarella sticks. The mozzarella sticks was the first time I had cheese the whole time here. It was amazing but was still nowhere near how American cheese tastes.  The sauced chicken was the spiciest thing I have ever eaten, hands down; I couldn't eat more than two pieces. After that I went back to my room watched one episode of Modern Family and went to sleep.

January 8^th

I was able to Skype with Terese in the morning before we both went to work. That was amazing J. I was able to take my safety training class. It was me with one Korean guy who spoke very broken English. He asked me if I was married and I said no then told me about his daughter who isn't married either. It was odd. I then went out to the field and did some piping checkout. Mechanical completion is in 7 days and there are about 3,000 workers all around. The workers all break at 10-10:30 and 3-3:30. This is the best time to get things done because you can move around without any issue.  After work, we went to Lotte mart and got some snacks (I got some coke zero and Korean Raman) and I needed to get some glue in order to glue my P&IDs together into a booklet. This booklet makes it much easier to carry the P&IDs around and they won't blow away in the wind. For dinner, we went back to "Frefre" and got the buffet. They have good food, pepsi, and icecream. You can drink during your meal!  After dinner I watched an episode of Modern Family and went to sleep.

January 9^th

I was tasked with comparing contractor build heat exchangers to UOP designs. This basically consisted of me walking around the FCC complex and taking photos of heat exchanger name plates that have information on them. I then used this information to compare to UOP design specs and I also used the vendor design specs as comparison. Everything was accurate. The lunch today was the best lunch yet. It consisted of a spicy beef dish that I covered my white rice with and a very delicious salad.

Near miss report (this is for work, figured I would just put it here too): I witnessed two refinery workers using two ropes to bring a pipe down from a platform about 150 ft in the air. One rope was attached to each side of the pipe and one worker was on the ground and one was on the platform. Two other workers walked underneath the pipe at which point was still ~75 feet in the air. The two workers underneath the pipe stopped directly under it and started mixing cement. The two workers directing the pipe yelled down at the workers for them to move but they refused and stood there for another 20 seconds. Finally the two workers under the pipe moved and the two workers directing the pipe completed the descent of the pipe.

His emails crack me up! like who writes like this freak ^^^ gotta love him :))