Thursday morning, we officially left Pohang for the last time. Our visit was short, but I really enjoyed it. Although Pohang is not very touristy and doesn’t have as much to do as Seoul, in a certain way I think that really made me enjoy it. It somehow has a much more authentic, “small town” vibe that you don’t really get in Seoul, which made our stay there quite unique. I certainly was going to miss the spacious hotel room, and I was not looking forward to the much more cramped room back in Seoul.

Before we returned to Seoul, though, we took our private coach to Ulsan, Korea’s eighth largest city. For our purposes, Ulsan was significant because it is the location of the Hyundai Ulsan plant, Hyundai’s largest manufacturing facility, and one of the largest car manufacturing facilities in the world. Hyundai is of course a South Korean car company, the third largest in the world. It also owns Kia, and a luxury car company called Genesis. Somehow I didn’t realize just how big Hyundai was. This was one of the company visits I was most looking forward to, and it did not let down.

Somewhat like POSCO, our Hyundai tour was divided into three parts. First we toured a museum focused on the history of Hyundai. There were lots of interesting displays and information there. Hyundai was founded in the 1960s and first collaborated with Ford, but their first independently built car was the Pony, which they started producing in the 70s. This is what helped Korea become relevant in the car industry. One fact I found interesting is that Hyundai production was extremely manual in its early days, with workers literally banging the steel with hammers. We also got to see Hyundai’s first electric car experiments from the 90s. They emphasized a lot how Hyundai wants to develop electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell technology.

We then got to see the actual factory and assembly line, which although not as awe-inspiring as the steel mill, was still very cool. The Ulsan plant can produce about one car every nine seconds, which is an insane throughput. We walked along an elevated pathway as we looked down and saw the assembly line process. It was surprising how much manual labor persists. The Ulsan plant employs 34,000 workers. Although other parts of the process are heavily automated, our tour guide explained that the assembly process is still about 80% human labor. This fusion of automation and human labor that we saw in Korea was fascinating, and it’s also a little reassuring that robots have not taken all our jobs just yet.

Finally, we got to see the shipping dock. After testing and quality control, Hyundai’s drivers drive the car to the dock and onto big cargo ships to be sent everywhere around the world. We were lucky to get to see this loading in action, as it’s not happening constantly, and it was cool to see. This concluded our tour at Hyundai, and we headed to Ulsan station to take the KTX train back to Seoul. We managed to catch an earlier train than originally planned, and again the ride was very pleasant for me. As we were waiting at the station we saw another train whiz past at full speed. I wish I could have caught it on video, but it was so fast that by the time I heard the train coming it was already too late to pull out my phone to record.

After we returned to our hotel, Chris and I took one last stroll around the Myeongdong night market. Although we had already done so several times, I wanted to do it again since it had been one of my favorite things to do on the trip. We ate delicious chicken on a stick and hotteoks. After that, I spent some time editing our final video before going to bed, prepared for our final day in Korea.