en.david.grajal

My first day in Seoul was my first contact with real Korean people in their own country. I spoke English with some Koreans and I felt like if they didn’t understand a word I was saying, probably because my accent was unknown for them or maybe because of my grammatical errors. I realized that I was going to need to rely on clear concepts. Nobody understood ‘May I have a 1 hour internet voucher for the airport?’ but everybody understand yoda style ‘Me, internet, voucher, airport, buy’.

Surprisingly I didn’t have jet lag. I was told that you recover 1 hour per day in normal circumstances, consequently I was going to suffer tiredness for subtle more than a week. Furthermore, the pollution in Seoul is a huge issue and the water is supposed to be a killer for occidental people. However nothing happened, if my body felt something different, it was really fast because I didn’t realize it, the pollution of the city is clearly worse than in Madrid but I didn’t feel tired because of the change. And the water… well, I don’t know, I’m still drinking bottle water because even Korean people don’t trust Seoul tap water.

Sight from Banji Tombs, the park just besides home

Instead of suffering jet lag pain, my first week was full of interesting moments. I was excited and I was in a extremely happy mood. In my first days I discovered Seoul, I met a lot of new friends and I started to experience the Korean lifestyle.

Seoul subway system (click to see it in real size)

Moving to Korea was a huge physical change for me but it was bigger the change in my mind, needing to share the place with my girlfriend. I’m one child and living together is sometimes difficult (even frustrating) because our place is extremely tiny even for Korean standards and we are forced to always share the space. In spite of that, our relationship is very interesting, always rewarding and stimulating. I feel that my life is changing and I’m growing into a new person.

This was the longest flight of my life. 11 hours seated in a plane without nothing better to do than sleep, watch movies, and eat the occasional snack the plane crew gave to us. I saw 2 movies including The rocky horror picture show. A must-see-cult-movie that I never saw before. Pretty bizarre and original, and a very strange selection for a flight Does really Lufthansa think this freak movie is appropriate in a plane?

I had a very strange Korean seatmate. She was a young girl, married to a French guy. She spoke perfect French, good Korean and very bad English, so it was pretty boring for me because I don’t know anything about French, less about Korean. Nevertheless I tried to speak Korean with her with my overwhelming skills, which are basically the phrase “You are beautiful”. She understood it though

Incheon Airport
Seoul airport is really cool. They show proudly all around the airport that it had been declared worldwide best airport 2005,2006 and 2007. Looking at the cluttered departures and arrivals panels, you can see that the airport has lots of traffic but surprisingly everything runs smoothly. And everything is close, I didn’t need to walk for 20 minutes, take a train and walk for another 20 minutes to arrive at my gate like in Madrid!

Tip-of-the-day: It’s possible to travel with banned food in baggage. I was told that nothing was going to happen, but I was a bit afraid that my suitcase wouldn’t appear in the luggage reclaim area because I was carrying a small quantity of Spanish ham. Custom’s guys didn’t even ask me anything, and that means that if you pack ‘jamon’ very well it’s not detected in customs. Very well is precinct storage wrapped several times in plastic film.

Next time I will come with several kilos of jamon!

Before Rollback, I had only read one book of Sawyer before, titled ‘The terminal experiment’. I remember that read it was a wonderful experience, although I don’t remember what the book is about!

When I saw this title in the bookstore, I instantly recognize the guy. That’s surprising, remember something, for my short term, selfish memory, homer like, fish-memory it’s a lot! I bought the book right away (plus it was cheap)

I must admit that I had never heard about this book before and I was surprised when I read the back page and I saw that this book was nominated for the Hugo 2008. I remember saying to myself “Waw! I had been too much time disconnected from sci-fi”

Let’s start speaking about the book, reading it couldn’t be on better time, because I just returned from Canada and this book is set in Toronto with lots of references to places I visited a few days before. Furthermore this is one of the the geekest book I have ever read, in the sense that the main characters do the same things we geeks do.

They explore the web opening tabs with firefox, they use google to look for information, they check slashdot, and one of them devote her life to the SETI project. And they are constantly making references to interesting Internet culture.

And what is the book about? It’s a interesting reflexion about two main topics. On one hand it show the importance it will have for humanity to stablish a first contact with alien lifeforms and the difficulty we will have to communicate over vast distances. Generally speaking the author mentions that something like that will suppose a huge impact in the world the first year but the lack of the news (space communication can take generations) will make the people to forget as time goes on.

On the other hand the author foreseen a future in which biotechnology has progressed a lot and people will have the opportunity to ‘reboot’ their body to the same state they had in their 20′ by reengineering their DNA and implanting new organs.

The most interesting thing is that the author don’t explore the topic in the tipical technological centered way, instead he describe his vision of what will happen in a marriage when one of them return to a younger state while the other stay old.

Mixing technology, aliens, cyphers, love and geek culture is a good combo. It’s a pretty easy to read book that I recommend strongly