golly i'm drinking a lot. absolutely parched. luckily my room comes with free bottles of water. it's dark now and the lights of the city outside my hotel room are so pretty.
the meeting at our distributor's office was about 45 minutes away from the hotel. it looks amazingly like seattle here. it's fall so the leaves on the trees are all turning golden. there are lots of invasive looking vines too. and lots of traffic. all of the cars and roads feel very familiar. unlike in europe where it feels so foreign with smaller/different shaped cars and big, open roads. jessie said that there are about 40 million people in korea and 16 million of them live in seoul. there are huge apartment buildings everywhere. on our drive, i was most fascinated by the number of greenhouses i saw. rows and rows of them. i think there must've been a couple hundred we drove by. she said they were for growing vegetables. (and by the way, this was in the city, not in the country) we passed open trucks with open flats of eggs, and heaping full of onions.
other notes:
- there are no seatbelts in the back of cabs here.
- people are very aware that the US presidential election is tomorrow (tomorrow is the 11/4 here; though it's only gonna be 11/3 in the US)
funny, a housekeeper just came by to bring me a postcard with tomorrow's weather information on it. it's gonna be partly sunny/cloudy, 14 degrees C.
the tradeshow floor is very different than what I've ever experienced in the US. It's mayhem in there with construction of booths. Most are huge cavelike structures made of wood that are burned after one use. So there's lots of hammering, painting, and wallpapering going on. This morning there were trucks driving around everywhere on the floor in tight spaces, horns beeping. people everywhere. i think i have been the only american person on the tradeshow floor so far. Tonight, most of the structures are built. Unfortunately, when I went to check on mine there were some issues. Nothing major. but communicating problems and trying to discuss solutions was a big struggle. My booth is nearly 20 feet tall and I needed the guys to go up and remove some parts of it that weren't supposed to be there. and watching them do it was totally freaking me out. they were climbing up rickety ladders standing on the very top rung without anyone supporting the ladder. then one guy stood on a fork of a forklift and had another guy raise him up about 18 feet while he tried to lift a 5 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot metal structure off. no hardhats, no protective gear, no support. i felt like i was watching a circus act. so i left them there. i couldn't watch anymore. hopefully it'll all get worked out tomorrow.
30 more minutes till dinner. i am so surprised at how well i'm dealing with this time change.
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