Dylan Schiemann

So far, I’ve yet to have nearly enough time in each city, but I’ve made the most of it while still keeping up with work. On Wednesday morning, I spent a short amount of time networking and more time repacking my luggage more efficiently.

Henrik, Floyd, and I shared a taxi to Beijing Capital International Airport. The new terminal 3 that was completed in time for the Beijing Olympics is massive, comparable to Seoul Incheon, and is located several kilometers away from the original terminals! That size of course means that it takes a substantial amount of time to get around, including a 15-minute walk from the business class lounge to the gate. Incheon airport feels more refined than Beijing, but both airports surpass any airport terminal I’ve previously visited. I’m guessing that the closest contender among Western airports would be the new terminal 5 at London Heathrow.

You might ask why I’m so obsessed with airports? I think it’s that nice airport terminals and train stations are some of the nicest engineering marvels built today, and the quality and approach to each airport reflects how a country views air travel. In the US, airports are overcrowded and generally unimpressive, as is the general level of customer service, while many of the Asian nations take significant pride in everything they do, both with customer service and architecture.

The flight on Air China was uneventful, with business class being mediocre but effective. Arriving in Tokyo was intriguing, as we were hoping to make it onto the last train at 9:45pm but had only 45 minutes to walk through the terminal, clear customs, buy train tickets and board. The motivation was to save a 200,000 yen (~$200)

Immigration into Japan was my first experience with biometric scanning which I did not expect. To enter Japan, you have a choice: give them two fingerprints and a photo, or don’t enter. This really surprised me because I know that Japan is much less into surveillance than other nations, but is more technologically advanced than any other nation in the world. Japan was also the first nation to issue a printed sticker as my passport visa

We missed the train, so we instead enjoyed a refined cab experience that even surpassed my experiences in London in a black luxury Toyota. I was quickly reminded that they drive on the left side of the road in Japan like they do in the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. I look forward to driving on the other side of the road in May and June around the UK and Ireland, but I’m glad I did not have to drive in Tokyo.

Overall, my first impressions of Tokyo are that it is awesome, precise, and that people hold themselves to very high quality standards. Because we arrived rather late, we got the chance to eat at a quick restaurant where you order your food outside the restaurant from a vending machine, and then eat inside:

Every meal I had in Tokyo was great, and this first meal consisting of gyoza, a spicy rice dish, and a chicken and vegetable on rice dish was no exception.

On Tuesday, I gave my talk at QCon about the Open Web, which was well attended and received. The use of professional real-time translators was an interesting change from every other talk I have conducted previously. I don’t think the translators were able to keep up with my pace, so I forced myself to talk much slower than I would normally prefer.

After my talk and a traditional Chinese lunch at TusPark, I had a press interview which also included real-time translation. In China, press interviews are more formal with all press members invited to the same interview rather than having a bunch of one on one interviews. In the US, this only happens for much more important interviews.

In the evening, I was part of a panel discussion about trends in enterprise development, but before that, Randy Shoup convinced me that I needed to have real Beijing Duck with him and a colleague. All I can say is, wow, I’m glad I did. Beijing Duck is like Moo Shu Duck in the USA, but astoundingly better. We went to a place that is known for its duck, and used to be a place that was often reserved for foreign dignitaries. The level of service was extremely precise, with red being the abundantly dominant color scheme. Beijing Duck makes me happy, and if I had to pick, it is probably my favorite of all the food I enjoyed in China, though dumplings, Hot Top, and kung pao chicken give it serious competition. After a slow and warm cab ride to dinner, I decided to share off my expertise with the Beijing Subway which returned us to the hotel much more efficiently than rush hour traffic in Beijing.

I’ve also had an intentional culinary sense of adventure, and have grown fond of tea, and have tried everything presented to me that does not look like an animal part!

On Monday, April 6th, our local QCon Beijing hosts gave us a tour of Beijing. We began early with a trip to Tiananmen Square, which can hold approximately 1 million people, dwarfing any of the squares or piazzas that I’ve ever seen, and is an amazingly powerful and symbolic place and includes Mao’s Tomb and more:

And here I am with Mao:

Tiananmen Square directly faces the Forbidden City. Deceptive in size at first glance, it is a massive collection of palaces and gardens that could take an entire day to view in precise detail, and would certainly have intimidated any foreign leaders that might have visited China over the years. By comparison, it dwarfs the palaces in Seoul and most anywhere really. My favorite part of the palaces was not the massive architecture of the buildings up front, but the gardens near the rear of the forbidden city.

This stone is extremely large… in order to get it to the palace in one piece, they created an artificial frozen river hundreds of years ago and slid the stone on the ice from many many miles away from the Forbidden City:

The engineering effort required to build the Fobidden City and the Great Wall is astonishing. Until I visited, it was difficult for me to understand why any of the locals appreciate or respect the current government, and seeing these buildings made things a lot clearer for me: the current government is a lot less repressive than previous regimes. I had a general uneasy feeling that if I did even one thing wrong, I’d end up in jail from a government that basically controls everything, and that single party is in charge of creation and enforcement of all laws. Beijing is the only city I know of that x-rays all luggage before entering any major sites, or the subway.

On the lighter side of things, for lunch we had a very classic Beijing lunch, with very authentic cuisine:

The people in China have just started learning to drive. People walk and drive in a way that’s consistent with everything about the Chinese population: they are aggressive and driven/hungry. Whether it’s how they walk, push their way onto the subway before passengers get off the train, order food, speak, and more, the population is much more direct and aggressive than Korea and Japan by comparison. I would argue that their assertiveness would surprise even the most aggressive New Yorkers.

After a late lunch, we toured the Birdcage and the Water Cube at the Olympic Village. I did not watch the 2008 Olympics, so seeing these two buildings surprised me a bit as astonishing examples of modern architecture. The cost to visit these two buildings was much more expensive than visiting the Forbidden City, and it is heavily skewed by attempts to recoup the costs of building these structures.

They are simply very impressive architectural feats, and photos cannot come close to capturing how impressive they are. I did make a short video of the inside of the Water Cube:

We had a large dinner for all of the speakers and editors at the Ho Hai Hutong for Sechuan food which was wonderfully great. I had real Kung Pao chicken for the first time, and had just an amazing all around feast.

I’m behind on my blog posts about Beijing and Tokyo which were both incredible and amazing, but I’ll catch up after I arrive in Queenstown New Zealand after an 11+ hour flight to Auckland and a short flight to Queenstown! I can’t wait to see the reversal of the coriolis effect for the first time in my life.

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On Sunday, I again took the Beijing Subway to meet up with Eric and Michael, who took me to see the Great Wall. Nothing that I have seen really comes close to the Great Wall except for some of the architecture in Rome, but the size and scope of the Wall is astounding. We visited the Badaling section and walked for several hours:

No attraction in Asia is complete without its own Starbucks:

Because it was a holiday weekend, the Wall was packed, but it was still an incredible experience. We were going to stop at the Tombs on the way back to Beijing, but skipped it due to extra crowds. Instead we had Hot Top for lunch, much like Shabu Shabu, but much much better than anything I’ve ever had in the US:

After returning, I had a Dojo dinner with a few local open source advocates, and then stopped for a snack at a local coffee shop. The area where I was staying, Wudaokou, is near a number of universities, and feels like Venice Beach without the beach, meets college town. A lot of tech companies (Google, Microsoft, VMWare, etc.) have set up offices in this area.

I don’t think anything could have prepared me for Beijing. In the US, we’re led to believe that China is a communist state, a.l.a. the former Soviet Union, but the people of China are capitalists to the extreme!

Kevin and Shinling, our local hosts, were a lot of fun to hang out with, but I started by immediately getting on the subway and heading to Dongsishitao (read “dong si shi tao”).

I immediately learned a few things:

• Seemingly long complex words in Chinese are a lot like words in Chemistry… once you know how they are typically divided, they are a lot easier to pronounce
• Most people in Beijing not only do not speak English, and some don’t understand the phonetic spelling of words using our numerals.
• Cell phones use our numerals, and require phoentic entry to auto-complete into Chinese characters (the same is true for Korea and Japan as well)
• Many services in Beijing are cheap: subways rides are 2 Yuan (approximately 28 cents), but buying a single-ride ticket is a real challenge if you don’t know what to buy
• Security is tight… all bags are X-Rayed before entering the subway
• The people in Beijing are much more casual than in Seoul

So, why did I head to Dongsishitao? To meet with my friend Eric, founder of Verican. He took me out to dinner at, of all things, a Mexican restaurant in Beijing’s equivalent of Scottsdale or Beverly Hills. I saw BMWs, Bentleys, and Ferraris. Margaritas were shockingly expensive (70 Yuan, or about $10). Dinner and drinks were fun, and I met a number of great people. We walked around trying to find an interesting bar in this interesting district:

That said, the smoke was a bit much for me, so I ended up taking a taxi back to my hotel. 30 minute cab ride: about $7. Gratuities are not only not expected, but generally considered to be rude or offensive when offered (which is also the case in Korea and Japan). At hotels and other places, you are charged a service fee which covers the gratuity.

After a couple of late night and early morning conference calls, and breakfast where I actually wrote and sent a first batch of postcards, on Saturday it was time to head to Incheon airport to depart for Beijing. Incheon is approximately an hour from Seoul by car (with train service still under construction). I took a number of photos from the car of interesting buildings, bridges, and road signs. It’s a very pleasant ride.

I checked in at Air China and was told my luggage was over the free limit for business class travel (too many Dojo shirts!), but my Star Alliance Gold status alleviated that problem. Incheon (pronounced in-chon) airport is fantastically modern and beautiful, including energy efficient escalators that only operate when people are on or near them, and the foreign airline business class lounge:

After catching up on a little bit of work, it was time to board for the flight across the Yellow Sea to Beijing. The plane had two separate boarding jetways, one for first/business and one for economy:

I felt a bit weird being the first person on the plane, but not as weird as I did once I realized that I was the only passenger in a 49-seat business class section. The flight was fairly full in economy, but apparently my round the world trip ticket put me in a class that is underutilized:

A somewhat odd experience was having four people waiting on me, watching me as I ate my lunch (take-off of the flight was delayed an hour so they served me lunch prior to departure). While the business class section on this 777 was nothing like Asiana’s in terms of seat comfort or amenities, the level of service for such a short flight was astounding.

They provided me with two local news sources translated to English, one newspaper and one magazine. The interesting thing about the stories was that each article concludes by telling the reader how they should interpret the story, making them read more like op-ed pieces than typical American news sources.

After landing in Beijing, I was met by couple of people from QCon and taken to my hotel. First impressions of Beijing will be in my next post, but here are some pictures from the airport and the drive to the hotel including IKEA and the Olympic Village:

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I spent a couple of hours at the N. Seoul Tower in the morning on Friday. The views were both amazing, and disappointing because of the amount of smog that blows in from South Korea’s neighbor on the west. N. Seoul Tower is sort of like putting the Space Needle or CN Tower at Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. There’s a nice gondola right up to the base of the tower, and four levels at the top: two observation levels with gift shops, and two restaurant levels.

While dining at the restaurant, I quickly applied a Dojo sticker to the window, took a photo, and then removed it. Unlike Austin, there really aren’t a lot of great places to apply a Dojo sticker with other street stickers.

In the evening we had dojo.dinner.beer(“seoul”) at “Jessica’s Kitchen”, in the tech district of Seoul across the street from the local offices for Yahoo and Oracle. Youngho Cho, long-time Dojo user in Seoul, was kind enough to help organize and promote the event locally. He met me at the hotel for drinks and we got to know each other, and then we walked around Seoul a bit before taking the subway to dinner. Their subway is smart in that the glass barriers make it impossible for anyone to get stuck on the train tracks.

I was quickly reminded by looking around on the subway that not only was I the only caucasian on my car, but that I was the only caucasian with red-hair that I saw in my entire visit to Seoul. While there was nothing wrong with this, it was an interesting experience receiving curious looks from people around me.

At the dinner itself, we had several other avid Dojo users attend, including two people from ThinkFree, which I had added previously to the DojoUsers page. Language barriers were a challenge, but Youngho translated as needed. The main conversation topics were related to getting Korea translations for documentation, Dojo 1.3 and our release policy, how to explain the benefits of Dojo to colleagues, what’s next for Dojo, how to contribute, cross-domain, creating data stores for APIs, and how to grow a local Dojo community with regular meetups and discussions.

Final pictures from Seoul and first pictures from Beijing will be in my next post.

My first impression of Seoul: What an amazingly modern, clean city. Incheon airport is shockingly clean and modern, customs was a breeze, luggage retrieval fast, and my ride was waiting and drove me to the Shilla on the most modern highway I’ve ever been on.

After flying in daylight, I arrived at my room in the evening with a breathtaking view of the city and the N Seoul Tower:

After enjoying a quick visit to the gym (best hotel gym I’ve ever seen), I crashed for a few hours before getting up to do some work. I then went on a short tour of Seoul, visiting Changedeokgung Palace and Gyeongbokgung Palace:

The best comparison I can make to these would be visiting the memorials in Washington DC, except that this is more like visiting Monticello, if Monticello was located in downtown DC. The architecture and gardens were phenomenal.

I needed a memory card reader, so I headed to the Yongsan Electronic Boutique, where you can literally buy any electronics device, old or new (think street markets in New York, times 100, just for electronics). I hear there’s something similar and most astonishingly cool in Tokyo, but I did quickly find a memory card reader for my new Sony camera so I could upload my pictures.

A few things I’ve learned:

• My bowing skills are subpar
• My use of chopsticks and even normal cutlery leaves much to be desired (Koreans do not eat food with their hands)
• The use of English here is very common, but my accent is impossible for people to understand
• Korean children are almost as impressed with red hair as national palaces
• You cannot get a to-go box for meat at the end of a meal, as there’s too much risk due to local restaurant health and safety regulations
• The internet is fast, and cell coverage is full bars all the time
• Things “Grand Open” here rather than having “Grand Openings”… seriously though, there’s an astonishing amount of English used, but very little concern with grammatical accuracy
• Trying to open product packaging with nothing sharper than a pen and nail clippers is an interesting challenge
• I’m extremely impatient

So far, I’m very impressed with Seoul and the people that live here. I can’t wait for tomorrow when I’ll go to the N Seoul Tower, and have the Seoul edition of dojo.beer.dinner. My complete set of Seoul photos will be updated on Flickr.

My quick stopover in Los Angeles was packed with good discussions. Last night I had dinner with Dojo Co-founder David Schontzler and this morning I had breakfast with Dojo Committer Gavin Doughtie.

I’m now on my way to Seoul via Asiana Air:

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Today also marks the official release of Dojo 1.3! In addition to a plethora of additions and bug fixes, there’s also a new set of documentation and a handy cheat sheet. Download it now and let us know what you think!