The conference was bizarre… lots of big names but almost no attendees. The rumor was that something went wrong at the airport, but I find I hard to believe that 1,000 souls were diverted at Incheon. The website had claimed that 1,200 people were scheduled to attned, but I would be boggled if 200 people were there, which means about 50% of the folks were presenters.

Even presenters were scarce. By the afternoon, when I presented, two rooms of threads were squashed down into one, because out of 9 or 10 presentations, only 4 presenters showed up. As the only chair (out of the 4 for the two threads) it was my job to get the schedule to work and even though we started quite late, it did work even though we had Korean marketing and Turkish tourist destinations in the same room.

I think this has partly to do with the fact that accepted papers went into a conference document with an ISBN number – so it counts as a publication on a CV. Also, I’m guessing, this conference is not known for its rigor in jurying its papers. As usual, I was the only person with an actual, footnoted, cited paper and some of the papers in the conference document were a bit skimpy on content. So, if you just want a publication credit, you send a paper in to these guys, then blow the conference off.

Everything was running spectacularly late, for some reason, and there was a classic moment when the organizers led us all to lunch – a lovely room with flowers, china settings, wine, etc…

And then told us that unless we had yellow meal tickets we had to go have lunch across the hallway. In the Cafeteria! With visions of the VIP luncheon dancing in our heads, we were treated to barley’d rice, Kimchi and, to be fair, a rather delicious beef hotpot. Still, it was like these guys had never put a conference on before - queuing us up before the promised land then herding us to the cattle call.

My presentation went well –the foreigners had lots of questions and the Koreans were largely silent because the numbers of my survey really couldn’t be argued. I was happy about this, because there was one irascible professor from Sejong University, who had given the Chinese guy who presented before me a rather large ration of shit for, apparently,not giving enough credit to Korean creativity when explaining the success of the Korean Wave in China.

Afterwards, I met some people who might be very interesting to know down the line. We hung around till they kicked us out of the college and then walked down to the Hoegi subway station. One of the guys was all about branding and supposedly has a website. He’s looking vor bloggers and I may try to jump in on this.

As usual, the English documents were rife with types. As you see, the lovely certificate I received for my presentation has an “alternative” spelling of “cultural.” Gotta love Konglish!