Sorry for the poor pun. I couldn’t resist…

So far, what I’ve seen of Seoul has been impressive. You can say that its a fairly typical Asian mega-city (I think the population is well over 10 million) with unrelenting traffic day and night, packed buses and subway trains, and mobs of people on sidewalks. And yet, I don’t sense the kind of underlying hostility and impatience you have in New York, for instance. Rather, everything is pretty orderly and people are fairly well-spirited for the most part.

I haven’t encountered any outright anti-American or even anti-Western attitudes. Everyone has been extremely polite and helpful, both at the conference (which is a mini world in and of itself) and outside the conference on the street.

However, I did see this poster at the university yesterday (the venue for the conference is the Seoul National University), commenting on the recent and ongoing protests against the importation of U.S. beef.