Me, talking and talking

I got invited to speak at a conference in South Korea called ICON. International Content Creator’s Conference (doesn’t that spell ICCC?? I guess ICON sounds better ;) ).
Anyway, I accepted the invitation and now I am here in South Korea. I have never been here before. I just gave my lecture/speak and it went well. First time I have given a speech with an interpreter. It went well, she was really good and talked to me a lot before my speech to try to understand what I was talking about. I guess it is a bit confusing if you don’t know any computer graphics at all.
I have been here for 3 days now and I have had a blast :) My friend (and former colleague) Young-il lives here so he has been a great guide. The first day we went to an awesome Korean BBQ place. The food here is amazing. In the evening I met some people from his company and we all went out for a beer or five.

The following day was the first day of the conference. I got up early to go through my presentation and add some stuff that I hadn’t had time to put in. (I’m glad I did, because the presentation ran a bit short). At lunch Young-il picked me up and we went on a sightseeing tour instead of going to the conference. The conference is mostly in Korean so I wouldn’t understand much anyway.
We went to Gyongju for lunch. It is an older village an hour outside of Busan, where the conference is. The restaurant was so cool. Basically a really old building with little gardens and court yards and you got your own little room to sit an eat in. The food was SO good. They just kept bringing little plate after little plate with food that was better and better for every plate. I ate so much that I almost exploded.
After the best food so far we went on to our first sightseeing point. The biggest temple in all of Korea. It was so nice and the area around the temple was a beautiful garden. The temple is still in use too which was cool. I loved the ornamental painting they had done on the ceiling of each building. Really beautiful.

After the temple we went to one of the world heritage sites here in Korea. It is a really beautiful stone Buddha inside of a cave. It was on top of this really cool mountain. That was our last stop for the day and we headed back to my hotel where I needed to meet my interpreter to go through the presentation with her.
Last thing we did that day was to go to a Japanese sashimi place for dinner. That was the most fancy sashimi place I have ever been to. The fish was awesome! They served little plate after little plate (seems to be the way to go here) with all sorts of things I have never heard of. And it was AWESOME! The strangest thing we had was a squid, where the middle part of the squid was cut up for us to eat, the back part and the head were on the plate and the head with all the arm was STILL ALIVE!! So crazy! The waitress poured some lemon on it and the arms and head went crazy and almost crawled off the plate! Woha! It tasted really good but it was definitely a strange experience haha!
Today I woke up, had some breakfast, went through my presentation twice and then went to give the presentation. It all went well and I event some questions :)

Now I think we are heading out for more sightseeing before I go to the ICON party tonight in the Busan Aquarium.