While at the Africa Museum in Jungmun a view weeks ago I spied a Jeju branded ice cream in one of its refrigerators. Curious to find out the origins of this product, as I hadn’t seen it before, I took down the address and telephone number so an interview could be scheduled for a later date.

Well, earlier this week, that interview took place.

Hallasul is a small business in Shin Jeju that operates out of a dilapidated office block. It’s an offshoot of a business that had its origins in producing a Jeju tourism brochure. Headquartered in Seoul, Jeju is managed through a local branch office.

The story of the ice cream was somewhat disappointing as there’s not much of it that’s produced here. The ingredients are shipped from overseas ready made. Only flavouring is added here (of course Tangerine flavour is on that list) before being packaged up for distribution.

A visit to the production room proved to the most interesting part of the interview- its bright, clean, stainless steel interior was a stark contrast to the surrounding, messy and darkened areas. Here I met the man in charge of producing the ice cream. A man who seemed to just link the automated production processes and press a lot of different coloured buttons on machines. The romantic and optimistic notions of an ice cream produced by Jeju had been dispelled.

So where can you buy this ice cream? Well, with its target audience being visiting tourists from the mainland, it is available at many major tourist destinations on the island. Including the aforementioned Africa Museum and also Ilchuland. Look out for a small orange tub in a refrigerator. However as the year progresses this older packaging will phased out in favour of a more ‘premium’ design (pictured).

I’ve been putting more work into improving jimsaunders.info/blog. It’s starting to look better though I’m still not happy with the green and red colour scheme. A dive into the CSS should remedy that. I’ve also installed Google Analytics and Feed burner.

One of the biggest changes with the design was a the move to two side bars on the right hand side. You may notice Jeju Life has a left side bar, a main window and a right side bar. I’ve increasingly fallen out of love with that design. In part because I’ve noticed how many other blogs run the two sides bars on the right set up.

I can’t seem to pin down exactly why I like it though. Perhaps it’s because as soon as I arrive from the search engine my eyes are falling on the content– there’s nothing in the way.

My latest book order arrived from Amazon today and The Longer Tail by Chris Anderson is the first of the two to be picked up. Now on their way from the US are Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing and Stephen Baker’s The Numerati.