Korea Go Trip Day 2 - Outing

On the 8th November 2008 is my 3rd day away from Brunei, 2nd day in Korea.

// our breakfast at the Cafe Suryeon, sadly, more delicious food is gone because we woke up late.

// Dedicated players woke up early and began to enjoy their game of ‘GO’.

At 11am, there is an orientation for all the members. There’s is a video presentation on the information, history and culture of the city. The name of the city is Paju and lies near the boundary line dividing the North and South Korea into two. It is formed in 1997 and the city came a warzone in 2002 in defending Seoul from the North Korean. Now, the South Korea is trying to promote the area by introducing many high tech building and is encouraging publication, multimedia company and immigrants. Remember most of the uncommon but outstanding architectural building in the last post? Most of them are publication company. The reason for the lack of people because not many people like to stay near to the north. Things are changing now with the implementation and idea of ‘Pajubook City’.

// Orientation hall.

// In the same building where we had our orientation, (and where Nouel Lounge is), A wedding celebration is taking place. We went into the room and requested for some pictures of the Bridge and Groom, (from left: Handy, Xinwen, Me, the groom, Sharen and the bride in front)

// Kimchi, is served at almost every Korea restaurant as teaser / starter / appetizer. I’m still trying to get use to the taste.

// Lunch @ Noeul Lounge. Me, Xinwen and Handy. Check out Xinwen’s blog for informations that I’ve missed out.

// Working crew for the 3rd Korea Prime Minister Cup inside the Noeul Lounge. All of them come from Korea with different skills, ranging from recorder and interpreter of different languages.

After the lunch, our ‘DMZ’ tour commences. We travel to the Imjingsak where the ‘freedom bridge’ is located. In the past, the Korean War in 1950 has separated around 7 millions of families by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). When the Korean War ended in 1953, this ‘freedom bridge’ is built to allow unification of families, friends and loved one. However, this “freedom bridge” was not a tourist attraction until 4th October 2007 where agreement of Relations, Peace and Prosperity is signed between the North and South Korea.

// Imjingsak Station. There is also a memorial and altar that honor ancestors. Nearby this station with a walking distance of roughly ten minutes, there is an moderate amusement park too.

It is situated on the top of “Mount Dora”. With a binocular, costing 500 won (roughly B$ 0.70 for a few minute, we can observe and have a closer view of the wired fence of the DMZ and the Gaesung City, the second largest city of North Korea.

// The Dora Observatory. (from left, Miss Vanthanee, Vice president of Thailand Go Association, Me, Army officer, Handy and Sharen)

// Outside the ‘3rd Tunnel’ station. Photos are restricted inside the historical tunnel, for more info and photo, please click here.

// This is the Dorasan Station (Train Station). It is the only train station that connected the South and the North, starting December 11, 2007. In the future, it is hoped that this station can extend and connent the whole railway of North Korea and the rest of China.

// The entrance of the Dorasan Station.By the way, does this image remind you of something similar in the previous blog post? Click here and check the second picture.

// The huge wall over here is the donations of various people totaling an amount of USD40million. The second picture shows the names of the donaters for the Dora Station.

We went to visit the 93 Museum, Gallery Focus at the Heyri Village (Art Gallery). There are galleries of oil paintings, arts, portraits and of course, stuffs like this one below..

// This seem like it is the real infamous kama sutra! haha.I have more of these erotic figures and images taken at the museum. Just gonna show this.

This museum is the last stop of the ‘DMZ & the 3rd Tunnel’ tour. It ended at roughly 5:30pm and our next destination is the KINTEX (Korea International Exhibition Center) building, to have our dinner and to celebrate the eve of the 2008, Goyang World Baduk Festival. Before the dinner, there’s a video presentation on the introduction of the city again, a different one. Next, there’s Korean Culture performance. It started with…

//A spectacular percussion opening done by this girl.

// The lady on the left joined in and dance around.

// (left image) All lightings is turned off and the only luminous object is the percussion beater on fire! She played the instrument with the fire-lit percussion mallet.

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// This is the ULTIMATE! This guy played the drum with his bare hand and water is filled on the drum’s surface. This creates a fantastic splashes of water, like water dance in accordance to the music, the effect is enhanced by the white light placed at the back.

// He changed his tools from hand to the percussion stick, this produce a better drum music and impressive splashes.

// At this instance, everything paused and he shouted “WELCOME TO KOREA!!”. This last performance is very enthusiasc and shows great eagerness and power! I enjoyed this performance to the max and it sure is adreanline pumping. felt just like when Tohoi cut his opponent’s car in Initial D, with the trance music setting in.

// Our dinner is served by this company, google them up and you’ll know that they are of quality~

// Our table number 2, a mix of Brunei, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, New Zealand.

The day’s event does not come to an end yet after the dinner. We went to the nearby park to watch the ‘musical fountain’ nearby KINTEX.

// Mr. Kim from Korea, Sharen from Brunei and Handy from Indonesia.

// All taken hand-held. The first one is overexposed. Lazy to adjust, again, all of these pictures are straight from the camera without any editing. lol.

SATA (something about the author): I don’t have enough sleep every night, busy uploading and is trying to blog daily. Despite this, I don’t feel sleepy quickly. I’m missing one day lag in terms of blogging. I love the weather here, one can avoid bathing at all in a day because you don’t get smelly from sweats. Sock stinks faster than anything else. I’m now feeling very hungry but there’s no food at the moment. Until today, I only spent US$1.00 here in Korea for buying a drink. I see more Canon users here than Nikon here in Korea. There is actually some shopping centre and stores nearby our hotel, I want to check it out but it is too far by walking distance, it is roughly a car ride of 15 minutes. Sigh. I’ll try to go there tomorrow, if there’s ample free time between events. Till then, see you all. Take care. =]

Korea Go Trip Day 1

(PS: All images are obtained straight from the camera, I’m lazy to edit and add watermark to each and every photo, so please bear with whatever’s wrong with the photo. Thanks )

Remember the Digi advertisement in KLCC as mentioned in my previous blog post? Here’s the output of the keychain!

// Keychain of Digi’s mascot with me, got this made for free!

After the flight to Korea using Korean Air, we reached Incheon Airport @ Korea on 7th November 2008.

// Sharen with ‘Rabbit’ figure at Incheon Airport (@ Korea).

Coming Korea now is just like dreams come true for a Bruneian, it is because it feels like there’s a colossal aircon blowing the street even though there is an overhead sun shining upon us.

// This guy is our driver. Roads in Korea are different from Brunei’s road. Road go forward on the right lane and the fastest lane is one the most left instead. This car is well equiped with GPS and it’s the first time I’m sitting on one. The GPS gadget is showing the ‘live time’ view of the current position of the car and it’s destination. It will instruct the driver to turn left or right vocally! When a driver drive past the speed limit, the GPS system will blink to indicate speeding. When one changes lane, the speed limit of the GPS will change to according to the lane he or she is on. Steady.

// We arrived at Jijihyang Hotel in Paju City in Korea at around 10am. This is our room, it is now a different story after me and XinWen moved in.

// At the restaurant of Jijihyang Hotel, the majority of the people here come for the Go Tournament.

// Our table with friends from Indonesia, Malaysia and of course, Brunei.

// Daniel, Indonesia’s Baduk Instructor placed his eaten plate on the belt, waiting to be cleaned.

// After our lunch, we decided to walk around the Korea, searching for entertainment.

That day was a ‘free and easy’ day.

Coming Korea now is just like dreams come true for a Bruneian, it is because it feels like there’s an colossal aircon blowing the street even though there is an overhead sun glaring upon us.

We can find a lot of buildings with special architectural design. Like this one here above.

// Buildings here are far different than those we have seen in Brunei.

// There are more..

// I’m trying to achieve the effect where hundreds of leaves drop from the tree, at least more than this. Fail.

// Here is more example of special architecure building

// This is the group of us wondering around the town. Guess what, we are the few people who is walking in the street. What happen to the other people? Why there are not much cars? We continued to wonder around, searching for shop, stores or anything.

// Hm, more buildings. There is a lot of nice, high tech building but I cannot see any signs of human. This building is not even ‘open’. Now, where are the people, is friday a non-working day for Koreans?

// Uncountable high tech buildling and nice cars. Where are the people? Are they inside? It is not the ‘Korea’ that is ‘as shown in TV’ to me.

// Xinwen and I have the feeling of ‘The Happening’ happening in this city where everyone is disappearing. Or the feeling of resident evil, parasite eve.. you name it. Along the way, we saw that many of these ‘buildings’ are actually companies. According to their logo and name in front, most of them are publishing companies.

// Where is Ha Ji Won, where is Rain, where is DBSK (TVXQ)? Where is Hyori? Where is BoA? Where’s the people? (Jin-no doko desuka?) We continue to explore.

// We found a restaurant! But there’s no customer and waiter/waitress. The only person available inside is the cashier. Hmm..

// After some blocks and several corners, we managed to find some vital life other than cashier. There is a group of people here taking video of something. We left.

// This is looking cool, but I have no idea what it is.

// Sharen.

We returned back to the Hotel shortly, unable to find solve the mystery.

// This is a restaurant at the 2nd floor of the Jijihyang Hotel

// Cafe Suryeon is the name of the restaurant. It’s is classy and warm inside. This is where we will be having our breakfast tomorrow morning. Come to think of it, this Hotel’s furniture and building is very new. We are suspecting that this is a new city, with all the new high tech buildings being built just recently.

Noeul Lounge (Spelling?). This is where we had our dinner. Building, flooring and colour paints look very new. Nice combination of colours, i like.

// The interior of the Noeul Lounge.

After the delicious dinner at the Lounge, we head back to the Jijihyang Hotel and prepare for the next day. It’s only 9pm and passionate players gathered around the ‘meeting room’ to have a game or two of “GO”.

// Games of Go, they are players from different counties, like Denmark, Luxemborg, New Zealand, China, Indonesia, France, Britain and etc.

I head back to my room and continue to online, chat and surfing until sleep. Yesterday I slept at 2:00am and wake up at 9am. Today, I am sleeping at 2:40am and there will be a meeting at 8:30am! Hmm.. Did I mention that the internet speed here is CRAZY?

// Freaking 1.0MB/sec constant! Well, for other downloads, it maintained around 80kbs/sec to 800kbs/sec. The highest I got was 1.2mb/sec, which stayed for minutes and dropped down to 1.0MB/sec.

Off to sleep, maybe. Hope you guys enjoy the pictures. By the way, the mystery of why there is not much people and cars or entertainment in this area is solved! Till the next post people, stay tune. Comments are welcomes, as always.

Pre-Korea day in KL

// on the way to Kuala Lumpur

Greetings friends, today is the 8th November 2008 and I am now in Goyang, Korea already, typing away this post in Jijihyang Hotel. On 6th November, Sharen and I were on transit in Kuala Lumpur to met up with Sinvoon (XinWen)

// KL’s airport is big and huge! (compared to my country’s). I like the design of the architecture here, Sinvoon said it is designed by Japanese people. We are on our way to collect our luggage and search for KLIA express to meet with Xinwen in KL Sentral.

// Sharen Tay, the airport is so big that in order to collect our luggage, we need to travel to another area (terminal?) by mini train. tsk tsk.

// This is me.

After getting our luggage, we found a luggage deposit center inside the airport. No point carrying the heavy luggage around since we are coming back here at night to broad another plane. We went to find KLIA express after that.

// KLIA Express in Kuala Lumpur, costing RM35 per trip to KLCC.

// KLCC, we only shopped for 2 hours here because Xinwen and gang got some other things to do. We only did ‘window skimming’ (not going in the shop) except the Kunikonuya Book Store. We didn’t managed to visit the lowyat building and didn’t bought anything from KLCC. sigh. Take note of the yellow building area on the ground floor

// Kinokuniya Book Store. It is vast bookstore with a massive collection of novels, magazine and other books. They even have magazines and comics in japanese language. You can find all sorts of reading material of different interest here. When I was exploring inside, the idea of ‘time is not enough’ came floating into my head, there’s too much to read inside.

// Digi’s roadshow at KLCC ground floor. The person in yellow there is teasing and entertaining the crowds. If you register yourself over the counter, free keychains with a picture of you and the person in yellow (mascot?) is given for free! I’ll show mine next time. I noticed that Digi spent heavily on advertisement in KL, as compared to other phone service provider. Celcom come second in terms of spending advertising. (i think).

// Sharen Tay, the officials and Me, the instructor of Go, going for Korea.

// YungYuan, Me and Xinwen outside KLCC, yungyuan is an old friend of us in secondary school days in Brunei. He is now studying Hotel Management in Reliance College.

// The peak hour of taking public transport using RapidKL (aka LRT).

At 10:00pm, 6th November 2008, we returned back to KL’s airport and preapared to check in for Korea’s flight. It is just a short day in KL, tiny details are left out though. =] In short, KL is more interesting than Korea! You’ll know why in my next post, Korea Go Trip Day 1. Stay tune. ^^

one of the ‘Chloe’ discussion session

Anyone remembered Project Chloe which I had made a post on it before? This project is still ‘on’ and the first shooting will be taken place on 23rd November 2008. Here’s a few snapshot of the discussion session between committee members.

Hope everything turn out well. Big thank to all the crew and cast for the warm support.

SATA (something about the author) - is busy-ing with state&society’s assignment. I need to complete it before the due date because I’m flying on the 6th November! Busy, ciaos.

During UBD’s inter-faculty basketball Final

// The match between FOS and IM in determining who is the champion in this ’round-robin-styled’ inter - faculty basketball tournament.

// // FOS (Faculty of Science) emerged as the champion after the exciting duel with IM (Institute of Medicine) in the last match. FBEPS 1 (Faculty of Business, Economics and Policy Studies, Team 1) is placed second and IM third.

In Woman’s category, SHBIE (Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Insitute of Education) is crowned as the champion, with FOS and IM being the 1st and 2nd runner up respectively. (No pic). For more information regarding the scores or pictures of the players in action during tournament, please visit http://ubdbballclub.wordpress.com. Below here are some of the ‘on match’ pictures between FOS and IM which I personally think its good. (with slight adjustment and cropping)

// Jun trying to block Chun Ping.

// Micheal and Chun Leong rebounding.

// Group Photo, I’m (front, far left) sitting with the guest of honour, Head of the Student Council of UBD 07/08, Hj Fathi Foad bin Dato Seri Setia Hj Abu Bakar,  Saiful, MPP of UBD and Sei Kee, the President of UBD’s Basketball club. (from left to right)

// 3 of my pictures are posted up in today’s Borneo Bulletin. (25th October 2008) I’m happy to see them but the photos are not credited to me. kek dao.

For more ‘on match’ photo, please click HERE
For more ‘off match’ photo, please click HERE.

Thank you all for reading and this is all. Stay tune for more. =]

Crown Prince’s Lamborghini in UBD

The Crown Prince arrived at UBD on the 17th October to officiate the opening of the 20th UBD Convocation Festival. He came with his lamborghini, which is parked at the entrance of the UBD’s chancellor’s hall. With my camera in hand, I can’t resist but to take some snapshots of it.

// angled view.

//back view.

// Crown Prince of Brunei Darussalam, the owner to the Lamborghini above.

Here are more, enjoy the pictures. Good luck to all the people who are graduating. =]

Studio Scene’s Cry of the Wild

‘Cry of the Wild’ dance concert is a performance by Studio Scene which is performed on the 18th of October 2008 at Jerudong Amphitheatre. My friends and I went over to support our friend HanWuen & Jiaren) who is performing on that day. Here are some of the photos.

// Children’s part of the performance.

// Group Photo 1 -

// Group Photo 2 -

// Group Photo 3 - That’s HanWuen in the front.

Here are the whole gallery. Happy viewing, drop a comment or two if you like. =]

SATA (Something about the author) - Introduce me a public place with a fast WiFi connection? I don’t have internet access at home and I can’t do my work effectively. =/

Sinvoon, his GO and friend from Singapore

// Translation : how will this story be directed? - did this out of boredom.

Sinvoon brought his friend from singapore to visit Brunei a few days ago. This is the first time she is visiting Brunei and we brought her to the Empire’s Hotel for sightseeing. Here’s some snapshots of that day.

Do you still remember Sinvoon? I mentioned him before HERE. He’s back for a break and some games of ‘GO’.

// Sinvoon placing his white stone on the board. (50mm is sweet!)

// Him playing with Haidar, one of Brunei’s top GO player.

I wanna thank him for the opportunity for bringing me along to Korea this coming November. I will be going there as a GO instructor in disguise. Going Korea will also mean that I’m actually leaving Borneo Island for the first time in 6 years, last being Shanghai. I’ve never been there and I’m excited about new culture, new environment, new faces, new weather and of course, the experience of riding an airplane. Also not forgetting the great chance for photo opportunities. Best of all, *ahemthistripisfullysponsoredahem* =P