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.