Let’s start this post in reverse chronology. The past few days have seen me exploring around Seoul as well as attending the various networking events organized by the Seoul Promotion Program. There was quite a memorable trip to the Seoul N Tower - Seoul’s version of the KL Tower It was really quite beautiful - I’ll be writing a full post on it later, but here are some previews:

The reception:

Me with some really lovely Korean ladies. Yes, most of them do look pretty damn good. The pop culture samples you’ve seen (eg Wonder Girls, Girls Generation, Hyori Lee, etc) isn’t quite too far off from the reality. I am…shocked. But pleasantly.

A picture at the peak with me, Rebecca, Jin Sook (an SPP representative) as well as a good looking dude from Canada.

Before the trip to the tower, we had dinner by the lakeside -

Awesome view of the lake from the restaurant balcony:

A Korean jazz band played as entertainment. Lead singer was really stunning. Reminded me of a Korean movie I’ve seen where the heroine somehow sings with a jazz group in a bar. Damn I forgot the title though.

The day before that was also another networking night - panorama shot!

Seoul’s night skyline is…surreallistically beautiful.

Malls are heavily populated even late at night:

Lastly here are some interesting Seoul quirks…a special pillow menu at the hotel I was staying, Coex Intercontintal Hotel!

Energy drinks you can’t find anywhere else:

And this last one is…like…wow. I usually smoke Kent, but I guess the only way you can smoke Kent in High Definition is in Korea

More soon! Seoul N Tower really deserves its own post, it will be up too!

Quick post. I’m currently writing this from the COEX Intercontinental Hotel in Seoul, Korea. I’m here on a sponsored trip from MDEC for business matching - Malaysian + Korean businesses. Anyway, it was a long flight (6+ hours) and I just touched down today at 7AM. I then spent most of the rest of the day walking around the Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (SICAF 2010). Here goes! (pics are fresh, just from 2 hours ago!)

The Bandai booth was pretty impressive: Robots, promoters and all!

Don’t know who this guy is, but he’s cute

Me testing out a cool Augmented Reality thing. Hold up the postcard to the webcam (the postcard has a special printed bar code on it), and it will ‘project’ images. Cool thing is that it changes perspective according to how you move and angle the card.

Another cool thing I tried was a gesture based navigation system. It was built by the guy demoing it in the picture below. It’s kind of like a Nintendo Wii controller thing (move your hand left and right/up and down) to effect what goes on screen. However, it’s without having a physical controller

This is Won Hee who explained to me about the system. Happy to have met someone that speaks English fluently all the way over here Apparently, she studied abroad!

I think most of you would be familiar with Domo-kun…

If you didn’t already know, Samsung is from Korea. They have quite a massive presence in Seoul, I saw Samsung Galaxy S ads…4 times! on the way from the airport to the hotel. You probably know their products well enough, so this is a picture of the pretty girl at the booth…

A motion capture thing (It’s how they plot out character animations in films such as Avatar). They are waving some sticks that translate to movement on screen. More on that later.

Lastly I leave you with an angry chicken figurine and his friends.

More soon! There’s a welcome party for Malaysian and international delegates tonight that I gotta get ready for. Should be fun. Stay tuned for more, I aim to blog daily/live if I can