Dylan Schiemann

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.