Trip To Jeju Day 3: RE CARES Lives!

RE Cares 2019: Day 1.

Monday greets us with beautiful skies, light breeze, warm temperature and a sight of airplanes in the air. Still jetlagged, I wake up around 5am, spend the rest of the morning prepping for the conference.
Texts and emails from other folks who landed on Jeju last night confirm their presence, and it looks like we will make it today...

I take the Promenade to Ramada Inn where the conference is scheduled to take place. No police officers try to stop me, and there is no reason - no high waves, the ocean is fairly quiet, and, again, the sun is starting to shine.

Monday morning: clearing skies, and airplanes in the air (view from our hotel room).

Olga is planning on heading somewhere on the island - I won't know her exact plans until later, as once I get to the conference, I am pretty much consumed by the event.

At the Ramada, I register and get my badge, meet Seok Won Lee, the conference organizer who has been working tirelessly for the last two days to salvage the workshops. I also meet one by one old friends and comrades-at-arms when it comes to organizing RE Cares.  After a short trip for coffee, we get to our room and meet our stakeholders who showed up in force - about 10 people are filling in the room. 

For all the excitement of the last 48 hours, the event runs pretty smoothly. 

I am opening RE Cares 2019: the only Monday event left on the program.

I open with a few quick remarks and pictures of typhoon-ridden Promenade. We introduce our presenters for the morning: David Callele to talk about requirements, our stakeholders to present their problem, Gunter Mussbacher to summarize our work to date.  

Our stakeholders want a mobile app that would help visitors, especially those who are mobility impaired, plan a trip to any of Jeju's tourist attractions using public transportation - where appropriate - accessible for people in wheelchairs.

The Q&A with the stakeholders runs over time, but we still get a quick break, and after that start work on the requirements, trying to put as many notes on the wall as we can.

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RE Cares 2019: Sorting the requirements into piles 

RE Cares 2019: our data/database requirements collected in one place.

 After that we take the picture at the top of this entry, and proceed to an improvised lunch Seok Won set for us - hot dogs and pizza - the least Korean food I've eaten in Korea, but with some distinct local flavor added.  After lunch we proceed through the synthesis exercise - form groups by interest and start going over the requirements and summarizing them. I am running the database group, and in a matter of about an hour and a half, we put together what looks like a comprehensive list of all the data we need.

RE Cares 2019: ... and the database is born (-:

At around 4pm we break, and start presenting our results: there are five teams in total, each dealing with specific aspects of the system: data, accessibility, UI, social and gamification features, and so on. At the end, four of us remain to merge the artifacts into a single document, which I will spend two days editing like crazy to turn into a semi-final requirements spec.

Meanwhile, Olga has successfully left the city, and traveled west to find a tea plantation. She is having issues with the navigation: the Naver app often does not load the street maps; it also makes it difficult to pick certain destinations.  Olga fails at her attempt to find one such destination, that is close to the plantation, and winds up, as her second tourist attraction, at something called The Glass Castle.

Tea grows at, well, tea plantation.

At the Glass Castle.

A guitar made out of glass.

Around 6pm she makes it back to our hotel and walks to Ramada to meet us - a crowd of about 25-30 people planning dinner. Our Korean stakeholders are figuring out which restaurant can accommodate so many people and eventually settle on a black pork bbq place that is located not too far from our hotel. We walk to it - first along the Promenade, then - along the street connecting the hotels. When we arrive, the restaurant is empty - looks like it is too early for dinner.

About Coffee, which we visited on Sunday, and the BBQ restaurant we visited on Monday.

We get settled at tables - ours has four people and in addition to Jane Hayes, my old colleague and collaborator, we have one of the locals, Suenboom, a CS student from Jeju National University. We get our table set for us - with a wide selection of salads and kimchi - probable the largest total number of different kinds we had anywhere.

Table set for four people. The grill is in the center.

We each get a slide of pork thrown on the grill on our behalf: for our table it's two neck and two belly slices. While they sizzle, we drink and chat. The waitress comes to the grill with big scissors which she uses to cut the large pieces of meat not bite size ones that we can actually eat with chopsticks. We try, for the first time, seasame leaves as the pork wrapper and find that they work much better (especially, in my case, when paired with hot peppers) than lettuce. The food is good, but the pork is quite full of fat, and so, this is a heavy meal for us.

Kimchi, salads and wrappers for pork.

When we are done, a long complicated procedure for paying for 27 or so people ensues. We don't need receipts, so we get out cash, and give it to Suenboom. We then leave the restaurant, stop over by the Antoinette coffee shop across the street, where Olga gets a drink, wave at our colleagues who are on the prowl for ice cream, and head towards our hotel. When we approach the hotel, the fish restaurants are at their brightest, with people standing in front of each door with menus and trying to convince us to walk in. It is easy to say no - we just had dinner, but we still look at the menus to try to figure out the prices for abalone, and some of the other seafood.

Seafood restaurants next to Whistle Lark Hotel. We are being invited to come in.

The prices turn out to be quite steep - abalone is $85-90, some fish at $50-70 (I can see how these can be prices that work a full meal for two people, but just for comparison, our BBQ pork dinner was 17,000 won - around $15. 

The seafood row in the evening.

We walk along the seafood row taking pictures and looking at the menus, then head to our room. I try to work on our requirements document, hopelessly fall asleep after about 40 minutes of work. So, that completes our first day at the conference.

Tuesday is the big one - our one full day of tourism together.

Trip to Jeju Day 2: Typhoon and Scramble

Typhoon hits Jeju.

We wake up in the middle of the night in a dark hotel room with a heavy rain outside, and finally plug in our phones and other devices. I spend time on the laptop. Reports from other RE Cares folks are coming in - they are stranded in Beijing, Osaka, Seoul.... Still hoping to make it to Jeju before Monday morning.

By about 7am, it gets lighter, but the rain is still on-going. We realize that the balcony door is leaking and call the front desk. Five minutes later, a hotel employee knocks on the door. He first tries to simply plug the leak, but then realizes that the water is coming from the top of the window, not the bottom, and calls in to have us moved. We pack bags, and a nice lady from the front desk escorts us to the sixth floor.

Our new room is ocean facing - offering us a better view of the carnage the wind and rain are doing to the promenade underneath the hotel. It is also a "family" room with two beds (a full and a single), but it is lacking an armchair from our previous room. Somewhere in the move I seem to have misplaced my Cowon MP3 player (I joke later, when we leave the hotel, that the player has returned to its motherland to die).  

By 8:30am, we have moved, are dressed, hungry, and want to get outside. There is a 7-11 store right next to the hotel and we had there first, braving the rain.

Outside Whistle Lark Hotel: 7-11.

We get coffee and some snacks - pastries, and a seeweed-rice-meat triangle that Olga once saw discussed in an "influencer" YouTube video, and eat right there, under the rain.

We then inspect the small street extending past the hotel, and full of the (now closed) seafood restaurants, with fish tanks full of fish, shellfish, albacore, and octopi.  Olga looks and them and tells them to enjoy the extra day of life they get due to the weather. 

The ocptopi in a fish tank: the stores are closed, they get another day to live.

The fish market in the morning.

We leave the strand an walk into town trying to find something open. It takes us about 30 minutes of navigating the narrow streets of the block just south of the hotel to find something. The block itself is pretty much a mall, with a variety of clothing and shoe stores, last fashion and everything, except for the fact that all of them are closed.  One street is covered, and we - already rather wet - walk it in its entirety, just because we get less rained on this way. Eventually, we hit the jackpot with a coffee shop called About Coffee which serves coffee and pastries (with a weird buy two drinks, get a free cake scheme going on). We buy two drinks and get a free tiramisu cake, which winds up being quite good - just like pretty much any other pastry we try in Korea. We also pull out the remaining pastries we bought at 7-11, and finish them as well.

Eating the tiramisu, at About Coffee.

While finishing our drinks and trying to dry out just a bit (I am wearing a rain jacket on top of the hoodie, but the hoodie is all wet) we also peruse the coffee shop's wi-fi to figure out what is open around. Turns out, 300 meters away is an underground market named Jungang Underground Shopping Center. "Underground" means no rain, so we head there. It is just past 10am, and as we descend underground, the shops are only starting to open. The market runs straight under Gwandeng-ro -- a local thoroughfare, and spans two large blocks.

Jungang Underground Shopping Center on a lazy Sunday morning.

There are two types of stores there: cosmetics, and clothing.  We walk to the end of the underground passage, and there I read the the stairs up lead to Dongmun Traditional Market. We get out, and head there, pausing for a few minutes to shop for a few things at a Daiso store we spot on the corner.

This is the first of our many visits to Dongmun market. Looking at the map of Jeju city, it becomes clear that the market itself is a  long (300 meters, or so) covered street running through the heart of a large block, with a lot of side passages leading outside.  On one side of the market is fish.

Hairtail fish at the Dongmun Fish market

Lots of fish. We see the same aquariums with live fish, leading to small restaurants with second-floor seating.  We see fishmongers cutting the fish and setting it up for immediate sale.

Dongmun Fish Market - a typical fish stall.

We see sashimi being made and sold right on the spot....

In a separate passage, we find the citrus avenue. Lots of stalls selling satsuma tangerines, and a local orange hybrid. Olga goes for satsumas, eventually buying about a kilo for 7,000 won. I like the oranges - we spend another 3,000 won on three of them. At some point our strolling back and forth the isle leads to the ladies who hold the tangerines for tasting to start withholding them from Olga (although I am faster than them, and I get a few more tastes).

Dongmun Market: the main passage.

Finally, from the side passages, we get to the main one, containing a mix of food stalls, black pork vendors, souvenir shops, and a few more things - terminating at the very end of the market with one big cloth bazaar.

Black Pork vendors have pig heads.

Following Aldrin's advice, I buy hallabong juice. There are no hallabongs for sale (we only see satsumas, and the other hybrid oranges, but no citrus has hallabong's trademark tangelo-style protrusion at the top).  The juice is good. Achievement unlocked!

Hallabong juice at the Dongmun Market.

Our cash is running out just as the market is coming to life (it's around noon by now). On Saturday, I used an ATM machine at the airport to get some money, but got confused with the number of zeroes, and got around $30, instead of the intended $300. $1 is around 1100 Korean won; all prices are pretty much in thousands of won, so it is easy to think of, say,  5,000 won as $5 (although it is more like $4.5). And we are down to less than 20,000 won.  The first three ATM machines - inside the market, and just outside it in a couple of banks spit out my card without comments or money.  Finally, we find Jeju bank, and its ATM machine cooperates. We get out 300,000 won - turns out, it is enough cash for the rest of the trip.  Glad to have the cash, we dive back into the market. and walk through a long seafood passage full of fishmongers cutting sashimi. We decide that sashimi is a good thing to eat, and start looking for some fish that is not your typical salmon or tuna. In one stall we notice some interesting-looking sashimi. Olga asks the woman behind the stall (via gestures and English) what fish they are. The woman picks up a net, and pulls out one after another three fish from her various fish tanks. We are pretty certain we've never seen any of these fish before. We make another circle of the fish isle, but eventually we approach the same woman and ask her (again, via gestures) to make us a half-and-half sashimi of two different kinds of fish (most of the sashimi platters we see are a single kind of fish and we want to try different things).  The woman goes behind the curtain, then brings two fresh filets and immediately slices them and arranges them on a bed of diakon.  10,000 won and we have a large tray of sashmi!

The next step is black pork. Apparently, pigs on Jeju are all black in color, so "black pork" is not "pork meat that is not white meat", but rather "meat of the black pig".

Black Pork at the Dongmun market.

We find a vendor that sells small-ish trays of black pork (big ones go for 10K won, ours is 7K won), and get one such tray.  Then we hit the actual street food vendors. First, is a stall where we buy a crab shell stuffed with crab, cheese, baby shrimp and a few other things, and roasted  with a flame thrower.

Food vendor at the Dongmun Market is working on Olga's stuffed crab.

The second thing we get there is a stick with a bunch of fried things: from crab to chicken, to cheese, to kimchi, to cellophane noodles.

Stuffed Crab

Comparative analysis of stuff on a stick and the legend

We then find another place that sells rice cakes, blood sausage, tempura, and fish cakes. Olga has a few pieces of tempura, while I get a somewhat healthier order of fish cakes - thin strips of fish on a stick (mine were unfortunately removed from the actual stick making them harder to pick up and eat) boiled in water.

At around this time, all hell breaks loose at the conference. The weather we are having has officially been called a typhoon, and the typhoon has successfully grounded all flights to Jeju from three countries (mainland Korea, China and Japan).  The conference organizers are working hard on moving all Monday workshops to Tuesday, because most workshops are lacking presenters. RE Cares, our event, is in a bit of a pickle too. I am in Jeju City, and so are two other co-organizers. But five more are stuck in three different countries, and some already know they are not coming until Monday night or Tuesday morning.  Unlike all other workshops though, our Monday goal is to meet with local stakeholders - it is a large group of college and high school students, who already made their plans for Monday.  So, we decide to buck the trend and run RE Cares on Monday. 

On the way home I text and email frantically at everyone who is here, and everyone who is not. We make some quick decisions. The three of us already here plan to skype at 8pm.  We are also monitoring a few long threads about changes in the schedule (as everyone except for me is also leading some other event at the conference).  In the meantime, it's about 3pm, Olga and I are heading home, and the rain and wind pick up and really get into it.  We arrive to our hotel room soaking wet, shed our clothes, take hot showers, and attack sashimi and pork that we brought home with us.

Eating sashimi at the hotel.

We like sashimi. The black pork is nice, but too fatty, and we have way too much of it.

I get on the laptop and start figuring out what to do on Monday. A plan starts forming. For simplicity, we will run the event precisely as planned, but we do have to replace a few pieces. Around 5:30pm the rain lets up, the wind drops, and there appear some clear skies out west. We get some good news - those of the colleagues and RE Cares co-organizers still planning on taking planes on Sunday board their planes and take off. 

Around the same time, we decide to take a stroll along the promenade and see how long it takes to get from our end to the other end where Ramada, the conference hotel is.

As we get on the promenade, I start taking pictures.

Jeju City - aftermath of the typhoon. 

A police car parked nearby turns on the lights, drives in our direction and stops at the end of the street. Two officers jump out and run towards me. I figure immediately that standing on the promenade (the waves are still occasionally going over) is considered verbotten, and leave the promenade, hoping that I only get a verbal lashing (and thinking to myself that back in Russia this may already be reason enough to be detained, beaten, and convicted for resisting the authorities). The nice police officers gather between them enough English to convey to me exactly that: promenade is not safe, we should get to the street.

A police vehicle is approaching me.

We leave the promenade, and walk along the street leading from our hotel to Ramada. On the way we discover Antoinette - a somewhat pretentious and expensive coffee/dessert shop (more on it in later posts), Martro - the Costco of South Korea (yeah - actual Costco - they sell Kirkland products there), and E-Mart, a department store, complete with a grocery store underneath it. We buy some food and supplies at Martro and E-mart, head back to the hotel, reach it by around 7:40pm, just in time for me to set up and get ready for the 8pm "So, what are we going to do about tomorrow?" telecon.

At the telecon, we discuss the plans, go over the Monday program, and pep talk each other. By this time some triumphant messages from our colleagues who have landed on Jeju reach us, so the main stress is over.