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This week I learned how seriously some Koreans take the relationship between older and younger people, and the hatred that some Koreans have for Japanese people.
Most of the Koreans that are at the lab, and that I've met at the the language exchange have been laid back about treating older people with respect, and have been pretty western. However one night I met a friends friend who knew almost no English and the first time we met he automatically assumed that I was older and started to treat me with the 'respect' attributed to elder people in Korea. It could be because he comes from a sports (soccer) background that he took it so seriously. But I can understand why some people take respect very seriously, it felt really nice to be shown Korean respect.
On a different day I took a taxi with a Korean friend and was asked what my nationality was. When I replied that I was Japanese he started to rant about why he doesn't like Japanese people and all the terrible things that they had done to them. It was good that we only needed a short taxi ride but was definitely a wake up call. I have since stopped replying that I am Japanese and just tell people that I am American when asked. This was the first time that this has happened in these 7 weeks so I do not think that this school of though is common.

I have finished the final versions of the Installation tutorials for Xenomai and PODO, and the tutorial for the installation of ROS simulators with the DRC-Hubo model. With these two tutorials done I can now move on to working on more advanced tutorials based on working with the simulated version of DRC-Hubo. For this I have to learn more about ROS and how to integrate it with PODO. Two specific ways I have been learning is:
1) Using the ROS-Joy package to control the model using a usb game controller
2) Setting up a simple navigation program to showcase the power of the simulators to experiment real-world situations.
I have finished implementing the Joy packages with PODO and have written that portion of the tutorial. However the implementation of the navigation stacks still eludes me. I will get this done before next week and will have that portion of the tutorial up as well. I have also just finished a rough draft of my tutorial on how to read sensor data from the simulators. This was easier than I had expected so I hope that I was able to write a good tutorial and that I did not misunderstand how to read feedback from the simulators. Though we started the upgrade process for DRC-Hubo2 (Jaemi) we haven't touched her since and am a little worried if we will be able to finish the upgrades before we leave. I will talk to some of the people from Rainbow about this today.

This is a picture of my first time eating raw octopus. The legs were still moving when the server brought it to our table. The white stuff on the left is the raw octopus and the red stuff on the left is raw beef. This was an amazing moment because I actually hate sushi. For the most part I don't like seafood in general but I loved the octopus. I was really surprised when I couldn't stop eating it. I had also tried Korean grilled eel but with less success.

I learned that though I might think I won't like something I should still give it a shot. Because for all I know it could become my next favourite food.

I met Jun this week through a friend from language exchange. He is also a mechanical engineering student. He goes to school at Kukmin university. When I told him I had met Dr. Baek-Kyu Cho before he was surprised.