To start off the day, I woke up again around 6:00 in the morning, and after breakfast, left with my group for a tour of the new City Hall of Seoul. When arriving in front of the Hall, we still had a good amount of time before our tour; we had some free time to look around the area. The first thing I realized was that there was a Tim Hortons right across the street, which was hilarious because my family loves that place. It was just funny to see a Canadian company in Korea but not in Pittsburgh. For most of my free time, I checked out the old city hall, now renovated more for a library and history museum. In the picture below, the normal-looking building is the old hall, and the glass-panel one is the new one.
At the city hall, we had a tour of the building and learned more about the history. Then we had time in the gift center where almost everyone in the group bought some kind of plushie or something else related to the Hechi friends.
After the City Hall, our group went to our first company tour, Arisu. “Ari” means big and “su” means water in Korea. Arisu is a company that extracts water from the nearby river and filters out all the bad hazards in the water so it is safe to drink. We started out with a presentation by one of the company’s workers, but he only spoke Korean, so our guide, Ester, and Dr. Yun translated what he was saying for the whole tour. I don’t have pictures of Arisu because it is a govenment funded/owned company, so photography was not allowed. It was very cool to understand the science on how the water is filtered to be safe to drink, and always amazing to see the large pools of water and filter basins they had.
After our company tour, we rested a bit and then had our Plus 3 Korea welcome dinner. I think this was supposed to be held on the first day, but there were problems, so it was held on the third day. We had Korean barbecue, and this was some of the best food I had. There was just so much food, and it was all so tender and juicy. It was so fun to sit with my friends, laugh, talk, and have this amazing dinner
