We spent less time at postech today, unfortunately not visiting PAL a second time. This was okay though, because we split off into groups and received a tour of postech campus by a student guide and got to see the interior of most of the buildings. They were all impressively modern with beautiful decorations and a nice campus lined with rose bushes. There were even herons spotted soaring around, along with the rest of the natural spaces on campus giving it a very relaxing feel. The campus was incredibly large considering the total student body of only around 1500, which made it feel even more spacious. After our tour, we had a nice lunch at a campus café with robot servers before heading off to our tour at the Posco steel mill.

The steel mill visit started slow, with a short company museum visit before the plant tour that while more interesting than the Samsung museum, still made me worried we would not be seeing much interesting production. I am thankful for how wrong I was. Unfortunately, we could not take any pictures of the interior of the mill to preserve company confidentiality in their refinement processes, but what we saw blew me away with its titanic proportions. We saw crucibles several stories tall like goblets for a giant being driven around by trucks that made consumer vehicles look like hot wheels. As we drove around the refinement site to get to the rolling mill we were to venture inside, we passed forests of conveyor belts and pipes spanning the skies like vines and branches between ridiculously large buildings. The furnaces reached 40 stories into the sky and dwarfed the surrounding landscape, to the extent that the catwalks spiraling around them looked like tinsel around a Christmas tree as opposed to something a person would reasonably venture onto. All of this impressive scale was nothing compared to the interior of the rolling mill. It was situated around a large conveyor belt track (wider than I am tall) with a series of different stations, all multiple stories tall, for the semi-finished steel plates to be passed through. These steel plates were several tons and along with the scale of the surrounding machinery made me feel as though I was the size of an ant, or wandering across the countertop of a castle in the clouds. They were glowing such a fierce red hot that from a catwalk around 150-200ft away, I could pinpoint where the slab was on the track with my eyes closed from the intensity of the heat. They passed through huge machines that enclosed them, built pressure as they blasted it with water, and released that pressure in a massive ejection of steam and boiling water when they opened up again sending it cascading through the surrounding area. The slabs were then flung through the track into rollers constantly doused with water instantly turning to more geysers of steam, passing through rollers that pressed them into progressively longer sheets to be rolled later. My descriptions do not give the facilities justice to their sheer magnitude, but I genuinely felt as though I had entered a forge of Hephaestus.

As a short end to the day, I went with the available members of my group, Jacob, Emma, and Manav, to a crab restaurant by the beach for dinner with Dr. Yun and Chris. They were covering it for us as a reward for meeting previous goals, and we decided to cash it in that night. We had unlimited snow crab for 2 hours and boy did we get our money’s worth out of it. We had 3 full platters of crab between the 6 of us, with Emma teaching us the ropes on the best techniques. None of the rest of us were as good at foraging the meat out of the heads, but considering this was my first time eating crab, I’d say I did pretty well. It was also delicious and so so juicy. It is funny to me that as a Marylander my first time eating crab was in Korea, but I do not regret it at all.

Thank you for tuning in once again, see you in the next one!