Too much meeting

[av8rmike]

Today, finally (according to my colleague), I got the taste of what the last trips to Korea have been like for the other employees, i.e. sitting in meetings that last from 9 or 10 AM until a lunch break around 1:00, then more sitting and talking until around 6:00. Much of it is haggling over minutiae and who did this or didn't do that, most of that done in Korean. The only interesting thing was the V.P. of the company taking a dozen or so of the other employees and us to dinner at a fancy Japanese restaurant, with course after course of I-don't-even-know-what. Since I'm sure no one wants to read about meetings, I guess I could ask: what would people like to know about, or what should I write about for the last few days I'm here? Post a comment here and I'll try to answer it, but I'm hardly an expert after being here for five days.

A beautiful carving in the ceiling of a Chinese restaurant we found in China Street (appropriately enough), near Busan Station.


<Dave Chappelle>I'm rich, biatch!</Chapelle>

Comments

[unclebill35.livejournal.com]

During my 1996-1999 travels to South Korea with the paper business (mostly High Pressure Laminates, a la Formica), I saw massive collaboration among companies regarding price of their materials and any quality issues they were reporting. Seems each place we went was going off the same script. I had the same host at each place, our in-country agent, so he may have had some spin on the translations, but I got the distinct feeling that their practices in this are WAY different than we have in the US.

Any thoughts?

[scout1222.livejournal.com]

So how much money is that, and about how much is it in US dollars?

[av8rmike.livejournal.com]

Well, my experiences are starkly different, because we're the client to the Koreans, instead of the other way around. In our case, we do engineering work for the company, which reports back to their government, which nickels-and-dimes us and the sub-contractors to death, while we're trying to transition from concept to detail design. Then, once the design has matured and grown, they get pissy because it's different from the initial design, which they told the government would be the "final".

....if you followed any of that.a

[av8rmike.livejournal.com]

The exchange rate is about 1000 Won to the dollar, but it's actually been closer to 900:1 since we've been here, and falling. The most I changed at one time was $200, and in the picture is about 140,000 W. That's around $140, but actually less. I'm going to get killed on the exchange back.