From Mt. Sobaek

This entry is part 18 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I’m currently at the observatory on Mt. Sobaek with a bunch of Korean SF writers/publishers/translators and astronomers, for the three-day 2009 SOAO workshop. (2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, by the way.) This is the Korean equivalent of the Launch Pad workshop held in the US yearly, and similarly brings together scientists and SF creators.

I’ll have more about this later, including tons of pictures and some video, but for now all I’ll say is that I’m catching just enough of the discussions to kick myself (hard) for not only not having studied Korean much in the last few years, but also for having let what I had learned from 2002-2005 ossify as badly as I have. Now, I’m paying the price. How shall I forgive myself when they start discussing SETI (and an issue I’ve been thinking about lately, the Fermi Paradox) tomorrow? 아이고!

On the bright side, I managed to hike for approximately thirty minutes up-mountain (though not always uphill) in my new boots and come out of it feeling just fine…

(UPDATE: … except that bleeding toe, but that’s because the nail was broken and then badly clipped. And it’s not serious.)

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2 thoughts on “From Mt. Sobaek

  1. Look at it this way, You’ll get tons of listening practice on a topic that you are intrinsically interested in.

    Also, this will no doubt help your motivation to work on Korean over the next year so that you will be better able to participate next year.

    Good luck!

    1. True! But as an SF writer, one never gets enough chances to bounce ideas off real, working scientists, and I have the sense that the missed opportunities are innumerable, in more ways than one. Ah well…

      By the way, I don’t think there will be a next year so much… as far as I could gather, it’s like other similar workshop projects in the West, which is to say, you go once, and then the next young crowd of promising writers goes next, and so on.

      More on the workshop soon… after the pictures go up and I get a chance to look at my notes.

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