I was picked up in the morning again by Kyoung-Ho and at 11 I was to check out the AV situation for my lecture at 2 that day. As I had feared, there were problems with the fact that mac computers are not used in Korea and none of the gearheads were able to figure out how to get the projector to recognize the Mac. It was clear to me that these guys had never even seen a Mac and despite my telling them that the commands for a Mac is NOT the same as a pc and I was afraid he was going to fuck up my spankin new G-4. So anyway it turns out that the fucking thing didn’t work and of course I am stressed because the translator was late and I had not had a chance to go over my notes with him. In the meantime we are scrambling to find a small USB flash drive to transfer my material to the goddamned PC. Did I say was getting stressed? Having to be the first one to give the talk didn’t help a whole lot. Finally a drive was found and then the translator was some kid that was born in Korea but moved to the US as a kid, grew up there and then returned to Korea. As it turns out he was lousy at both English and Korean and it was clear that the translation was not going well. In addition, he was taking too long to translate, it was obvious that he was going from notes from my text that I sent for publication and not necessarily related to the show, god I could have strangled him. Unfortunately time ran out for Part III so I was not able to conclude my talk very effectively. I felt like a failure.

So then I had to sit through the final three talks which were all in Korean – (Alessandro’s talk was in Italian and was translated to Korean)

Then there was the question and answer period – and all the questions were for me, and the translation nightmare continued. Scott (the ‘translator’) could not clearly translate the questions, and to compound the problem, he kept whispering the questions, and I couldn’t hear the questions. Oh god it was awful. I did answer the questions, some took some time to think about, they weren’t the easiest questions to answer ‘on the fly’. As I am writing this nearly a week later, I can’t even remember the questions, I probably just wanted to delete this from memory, so to speak.

Finally the ordeal was over and we are all herded (sans the bbw) upstairs again to the same Chinese restaurant for a ‘congratulatory’ dinner. And yes the same exact menu. I wasn’t hungry – probably just due to the lecture and then the same menu was not appealing, and no, I did NOT touch the sea cucumber thing again. Icky.

I couldn’t wait to go back to the hotel and just FLOP. Thank god the day was OVER.