Oil and Water

Today we set off nice and early in our business casual for our last site visit of the trip. 

Before then we did I quick stop in oil tanker culture park, a park the doubles as museum and walking paths through trees. However, unfortunately it had recently been sold as private property, and we were not able to go inside any of the oil tanks. Due to our long pants with our business casual and the 85-degree weather the group decided instead to have an early lunch than walk around the hot area.  

After lunch we visited Arisu the water purification center for Seoul and Korea’s tap water. Founded in 1908 by Americans to provide the expanding city of Seoul with more accessible cleaner water the original building is a quarter of the size of how it is today. Used up to the 1980s the old facility held water levels up to 4 meters and used sand, rocks and a simple brick bottom filtration system to clean Seoul’s water. Today’s facility is much more advanced, having 8 stages of purification to get the water as clean as possible for residents. This water is pulled from the Han River and filtered numerous times becoming so pure that it is safe to drink straight from the tap and is even better than bottled water. City Hall routinely checks the water with 9 separate in-depth water tests, and they have never failed once since their opening in 1998. We were even able to drink some water direct from the purification center and it was delicious.  

A cute/sad moment during the tour was when a bird got stuck inside the glass door entryway to the facility and struggled to get out. After a few minutes he was eventually able to get out and there were many cheers when the group realized his success. 

At the end of the day, I went for some last minuet shopping at olive young and went home to work on my team’s presentation for the next day.  

Signing off until tomorrow.