2003-09-27The mayor's reception

You may have got the impression from what I wrote until now, that Incheon is not such a big city, but that is not the case. It has 2.6 million inhabitants. But is like a chain of smaller municipalities, wrapped around several mountains. It goes from the sea to Seoul, in area it is 1.5 times the area of Seoul.

Yesterday evening we were told that there was a change in the program, and that we would have a lunch in the City Hall. Because of the late announcement not everybody knew about this and some people were missing. We got a speach from the mayor, mr Ahn Sang-soo, a short movie about Incheon's ambitions, and a delightful lunch. The City Hall was impressive.

The draw

The drawing ceremony takes place after 15:00 hours. With simultaneous translations into English, Chinese and Japanese, quite an interesting happening. Of course what can go wrong will go wrong and most of the English translations were hard to understand.

The draw for the first round was more or less "the strong will play the weak". But not completely. Emil drew Dmytro, that will be interesting. Another interesting game might be the game of Vesa. All other draws seem to be walkovers for the stronger player.

The show

After a quick dinner we went to the stadium. To see football? No, although there was a match going on. Just outside the stadium an open air theater had been built, especially for the IWABC, and a big show was organised for us, starting 19:00 hours. It was at some times fascinating. And I am changing my mind about the organisation. Incheon wants to show us where they are on the global map. And they want to do this every year, they said.

The show ended with a small but impressive firework. Tomorrow is another day full of receptions and special events. I am looking forward to it.

Some random notes

The small green bowls were far too expensive. They were not signed so there was now way to verify whether they were really worth the money.

The problem with the Internet in the hotel is that probably the cable in my room is broken. I tried to get it fixed, but I do not think the hotel personnel understood me, and so it was never fixed. But I got on the Internet because there is a wireless LAN nearby that accepts me to connect. It is probably in the hotel, although it is not mentioned anywhere in the hotel guide. Anyway, the quality is not very good, the DNS server regularly is unreachable and some times it is very slow. But other times it is just what I expected: very good speed. You know 50% of all households in Korea has broadband access to Internet?