We started the day with a tour through Seoul City Hall, and as impressive as the building’s appearance is, the interior was far more stunning. Massive vertical gardens spanned several floors highlighting a lush lobby that I would love to see incorporated more in American architecture. The amount of nature woven into the architecture we have seen here in Korea reflects a respect and appreciation for the environment that we can learn a lot from in our engineering careers. This environmentally focused approach to problems that typically disregard nature both enhance the design and benefit the environment simultaneously, and I plan to reflect on this for my future designs. The tour itself was nice, and there was a kind old lady showing us around and teaching us about the history of the building.

After the city hall tour, we went to go get a suba suba lunch and we could not have done it more incorrectly as we were told. We had no idea which of the ingredients went with which stage of the meal and how to add each one to the broth, but through trial and error (emphasis on the error) we managed to power through. It ended up being absolutely delicious and my only regret was that I could not eat more. I thought the experience of failing and getting funny looks from the other patrons as we ate everything wrong was genuinely enjoyable and I wouldn’t have wanted my first experience to be any other way.

Next up was the water treatment facility tour. This was exactly what I was hoping for from my professional visits here in Korea and I loved being able to see how the process worked from start to finish. We were unfortunately unable to take any pictures of the interior or the treatment systems, but I this only made me feel like it was a more secretive and exclusive visit, so I didn’t mind. A researcher there walked us through the facility and explained to us each of the several different stages of purification as we saw countless gallons of water flowing from pool to pool.

Thank you for tuning into the blog again, more updates to come!