Membership Trainin'

You haven’t really experienced what it is to work at a Korean company until you have been on a company outing or MT (membership training). So after having been employed here at AC Nielsen Korea for two months, I can happily say that I have experienced my first MT.

It started out on Friday morning at 8:00am. I was going on only a few hours of sleep since I went out to chill with the Wonderland boys the night before and had to stay up and pack everything I would need. After consuming a Starbucks Double Shot and making my way groggily towards work, I saw the 2 buses we would be riding for most of the day. They were huge tour buses and were parked right out in front of the company building. After helping load some things and taking a moment to check my e-mail, we departed from the company at about 9:00am.

Most of us were pretty tired so from nine until about eleven thirty we all slept until the bus came to a halt at a stop over station. I roused myself so I could use the bathroom and have another coffee. After having lunch at a pretty cool fish restaurant, we started off again towards our next destination: the boat.

Me on the boat

The boat ride lasted about 2 hours or so and was very scenic. Even though it was incredibly cold on the roof of the boat, we all braved it for awhile so we could get some good photos. The wind was cold but clean and the scenery was really beautiful.

The boat we rode on from an elevated angle

View from the top of the boat

Would hate to fall off of that

After getting off the boat and back on the buses, we traveled for a couple more hours until we were at a cave. Everyone (except the upper managers) went through a 40 minute cave walk where I found out I am a mild claustrophobic. Some parts of the cave were really nice too look at but for the most part it was climbing wet, rusty stairs and steering clear of bumping your head on a protruding rock. The coolest thing about this excursion was the fact that I got to use the word “spelunking” about 10 times in context.

Inside the cave

After heading out of the cave, we hopped back on the buses and made our way to the final destination: the resort. The resort itself was pretty nice looking and you could tell that it was huge. After getting settled into our rooms, I met up with our team so we could put the finishing touches on the performance we would be doing that evening. We worked on it for about 40 minutes then made our way down to the main dining hall and dined on some delicious bulgogi with tons of side dishes. The main event we were all waiting for happened right after dinner.

Part of the resort we stayed at

The party room was set up really nicely. There were about 10 really large tables set up for people to sit down at and a little stage set up complete with karaoke machine. We started by introducing ourselves to everyone (there were about 100+ people involved in this after all) and as soon as we were finished, we had to drink a boilermaker in one drink. For those of you that don’t know, a boilermaker is a glass of beer with a shot of whiskey dropped in it. Most of us had to drink super-boilermakers (half beer/half whiskey) and there were quite a few red-faced girls by the end of it. We ended up spending about 4+ hours in the party room and did all sorts of fun stuff including: team games/ karaoke singing/ newcomers performances (we got 2nd place)/ and random drinking games. We polished it all off with a visit to the largest karaoke room I’ve ever seen and spent about two hours there singing. I got to sing Stevie Wonder’s “Lately” and Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” all to rousing cheers which were probably more for me having the balls to sing in front of the company rather than my singing abilities. It was fun.

The party room

Me introducing our team

Finally, we all grabbed a night cap in a room the company rented for solely that purpose. After hanging out for awhile there, I finally got to bed. The next morning I woke up, ate and hopped on the bus back home. It was a great trip and I got to take lots of good pictures and videos. I hope the next MT (sometime in summer I think) is at least as good as this one was but I think it’s going to be hard to top.

Here’s to MTs.

The view from my room in the morning