Wetskills-South Korea 2018 – Today is the day that the actual production begins. Last days we were all busy with brainstorming about solutions and ideas. Now every group has come up with a solution for the problems. In my case we did not have to solve a problem, but we had to design a game competition between islands to stimulate water saving innovative thinking. With the concept ready it was now time to start the production process of the big three: Poster, Pitch and Paper.
Our case owner prefers graphics above text so we spend the whole day creating flow charts and figures. The idea is that by only looking at these figures you can figure out the main concept of the game competition very well. This a difficult job when you want to be professional and therefore refuse to work with Paint. Fortunately one of my group members is a great photoshop/Powerpoint graphics creator. Although it takes a lot of time to create a large figure explaining the whole game competition with nice graphics, the result is absolutely stunning. So at the end of the day we had a nice poster concept and already a large part of our paper writing finished. Then it was time for the last challenge the Pitch. With all the energy we had left we made an elevator pitch with a duration of 2 minutes. It is not perfect yet, but I am sure that tomorrow we are going to make it pitch perfect.
Although today was a very productive day we also had a lot of fun. During lunchtime we went outside to grab the best lunch in one of the popular student restaurants. The food we had is actually until now my favourite Korean food. I tried it already on the first day of Wetskills and I was overexcited when people told me they were planning to have lunch there again. The name of the food is called Jyeyook dupbab. The literal translation is rice covered with sauce. And indeed is it rice covered in a delicious (not too) spicy sauce with incredibly good pork pieces within it. If you ever plan to go to Korea make sure you will try this meal.
Today was also about some new experiences. The first one was trying the instant noodles. After already hearing the horror stories of other Dutch students about to spicy instant noodles I got a bit scared to actually try them. I was too afraid to buy them by myself without being able to read the level of spiciness. So I asked one of my Korean friends to help me choosing one. This was nice cause I turned out to have a great portion of noodles with a good taste. It is not the most delicious food in the world, but if felt that I at least needed to try it once during my stay here.
The second experience was doing the laundry. Normally a weekly activity that is not that difficult. Here in Korea it is a challenge. At first you have to buy a laundry card from a machine. We thought that this would be the most challenging part. I was therefore very pleased to see that they had an English explanation next to the machine on how to get a card. The machine was very colourful, with some nice lights where you needed to enter your money. This was all very easy and within a few seconds we had our card with credit on it. With a big smile and 3 full bags of laundry we walked to the washing machines. Again they had some English explanation on where to put the detergent and how to start the machine. Only step 4 of this explanation was the though part. It said choose your program, but on all the buttons on the machine there was only Korean. The same turned out to be the case for the tumble dryer. To avoid to risk that all our clothes would shrink we just choose 3 different settings for every washing machine. When we came back to get the laundry out I was very pleased to see that the clothes are still my size. Now my clothes are still in the tumble dryer and I am curious how this will work out. Hopefully I will still fit my clothes. If this is not the case I will just have to enjoy a Korean shopping experience, which I think will not be a bad thing since Koreans fashion is very nice!
Britt Albers
