Week 4! But Actually Week 3...

Sorry for the late post, I've been in Busan all week and I totally forgot until today.  Which happens to my birthday!  Woo!  Exciting.
Received a lovely care package from my mother and wonderful card from my brother and his girlfriend.  Made my day!  And most of the fun parts of this trip has been from my father's fantastic present of a fat stack of premium Korean won.  So thank you to my family!  You all are the best.

So Busan!  Went down to Busan National University on Monday, came back yesterday evening.  Took the KTX (a Korean express train who's acronym I can't tease apart, but what I suspect stands for Korean Train Express) which was pretty fast.  As far as I can tell Korea is about half the length of Florida, so we crossed that (Seoul and Busan are at opposite ends of the country) in about 2 hours.  So not too bad I'd say.

Busan itself is pretty cool.  It's the biggest port city in Korea as I understand, and is know for it's beaches.  Obviously fish was on the menu pretty much everywhere, but I was surprised at how good the Italian food in the area was.  Great pizza pretty consistently everywhere.  The beaches also lived up to their reputation.  A popular nighttime activity there is launching off roman candles, which helpful elderly women walk along the beach selling 3 for $5.  As someone who grew up in The People's Republic of Massachusetts where fun (and fireworks) are illegal this was something of an awakening for me.  Fireworks are freaking awesome.  I may or may not have blown about $30 on them.

Busan's slogan is "Dynamic Busan", as it is a pretty lively place.  People were boisterous and pretty active.  On Saturday night we say young kids (younger than 9) out with their parents well into the night.  Picnics and public parties are popular.  Overall a city I would highly recommend visiting, especially if you like raw fish and Italian food.

Sunday I took a hike with the travel buddy Corey (see this week's pictures [I totally forgot to take any pictures in Busan, and for that I apologize!]).  Seoul National University campus is basically set in a basin, and is ringed by a sort of continuous ridge of peaks, upon the tallest of which is a weather station visible from our apartment, but shockingly difficult to get to.  As I learned later we climbed up the back side, while the front side has stairs.  I'm okay with that though, it was an exciting climb with all kinds of tricky slopes and fun rock climbing.  The trails here aren't as well defined as in the US though, so the climb down was totally off the path and sort of following a dry drainage bed down a steep mountain face.  That was a little less fun, but we made it without injury.  The overall philosophy of Korean trailblazers seems to be "make little suggestions of what might be a path and most people will eventually figure it out" (see: exciting climb).  That was a pretty awesome hike.

On the project front things are proceeding well!  The main purpose of me visiting BNU was to have a professor there help me install an algorithm/simulation library on my supercomputer account (the KISTI computing cluster is basically a massive computation server somewhere in Korea that I now have a user account on and will be using for the bulk of my simulation/computation).  This sounds pretty easy, it's basically software installation, but it due to schedule conflicts, software error, and me not having ever really used a Linux terminal before ended up taking the better part of a week.  The good news is that I'm much more versed in Linux than I was before, it was basically a crash course.  The second goal was a little easier, and was essentially to have the professor confirm and patch up my understanding of Fisher Information Matrices and waveform simulation (I'll try and put up my slideshow and notes so that interested parties can check it out a little) as well as help me understand the Python (computer programming language) and Mathematica (computer algebra system) he wrote for calculating the Fisher Matrices.  That was all fairly straightforward.  So the good news is I finally got up and running with all that, and I have begun to write introduction and background for my final report.  Tomorrow I hope to get a little more background on the second half of the scripts and libraries I'll be needing for this project (the MCMC half of things [that acronym will be clearer if I can get the slideshow up).

So there's the bulk of it.  So far things are going well!  My goal for the next week or so is finish some good chunks of the intro and background for my report, visit at least one palace or temple, go to more Capoeira, and memorize the Korean alphabet.  Wish me luck!