Soccer and the Shipyard

Soccer fever here has since declined after Korea was knocked out of the World Cup Saturday night. But man what a party it was! We were told that Hyundai was hosting people in their gymnasium to watch the game on a big screen. I expected a high school gym with the game projected on a screen but as soon as we walked into the stadium, we all caught soccer fever. Easily over 3,000 people were in the bowl watching the game on three screens with cameras catching reaction shots from the crowd! They had their own halftime show, cheerleaders, drummers leading chants, you name it. The drummers would lead us in two main chants, the first being "Dae han min guk!" (bum bum, ba bum bum!) "Dae han min guk!" (bum bum, ba bum bum!) "Dae han min guk!" (bum bum, ba bum bum!) (Repeat until hoarse.) "Dae han min guk" is the formal name of Korea. The other was "Oh, pil seung Ko-re-a, oh, pil seung Ko-re-a, oh, pil seung Ko-re-a, o- ho-o-ho-o HEY HEY HEY!". Our Korean pals told us it means "certain victory" in Korean. The atmosphere was electrifying and we really were all hoarse by the end of the night.

Recovering Sunday, we checked out Ulsan University, where we will spend our last week taking classes about the culture of Korea, ate duck stir fry, and visited a bar named "Cow 9", mainly because of the name and the novelty of going to a southwestern bar in the middle of Korea.

This week at Hyundai was our first in the actual shipyard and each day we have visited a different department in charge of a different part of the ship construction process. The massive 1000+ foot ships built here are steel and begin as 9 foot by 24 foot plates of 3/8"-1" thick steel. The first day we visited the factory in charge of joining these pieces together into "blocks". A block can be likened to the pieces created by dicing a tomato or onion into 100 pieces. Each hunk is a block and a ship is constructed by building each block separately and welding them together in a dock that will eventually get flooded so the boat can float away. The second day we visited the docks where the blocks were being joined and were given a behind the scenes tour of the goliath orange gantry cranes which drop the blocks into place. Being 350 feet in the air on a moving machine made my heart skip a beat when we stepped out of the guts of the crane. Wednesday we examined the process of how the deckhouse of a ship is constructed (the big tower with windows on it that sticks up above the body of a vessel) and we toured a few completed ships ready to be delivered. Today we learned more about how a shipyard of this magnitude is run which consisted of visits to the "control tower" of the yard and lessons on how they construct with such precising and minimal reworking of steel to make the vessel fit together.

On a side note, they serve Korean style Raman noodles here as a main course. I think I've died and gone to heaven.