Paella!

What was interesting was my reaction to be exposed again to the language. I was completely used to live in countries where I didn’t understand the language. In this time I discovered I really like to be able to completely disconnect from what surrounds me when I’m in public spaces.

In contrast, in Spain my brain was constantly working, catching conversations I should not pay attention to. I got tired of understand everything. I was in the streets sneaking into other people conversations. I shared complete conversations on buses and trains. I got completely frustrated. I could’t switch off my brain and It was exhausting.

Another interesting thing was realizing that doesn’t matter what you do, the world change but only if you want to accept the changes. I changed a lot in this last year. I’ve been traveling and I had the opportunity to become influenced. I become a lot more open minded sharing pieces of my life with interesting, silly and funny people from all around the world. I’ve living immerse in a completely different culture and I’ve questioned lots of things that I usually gave for granted. All in all I realize we are small persons in a big world and each one of us have different dreams. Each one pursue they dreams in a different way and all of them are valid because there is always a reason behind. Looking back to how I was one year ago, I can easily see that I changed a lot. However all my friends continue being the same way. Of course this is not bad but I didn’t realize how much I really have change until I returned to my hometown.

In conclusion, I really like to be living in a place where I don’t really belong. Yes, you lose contact with your family and friends but It make you more conscious. It’s easier to question why the things are like they are. You become more critical about what it is around you. And I feel more positive and comfortable with myself.

Medieval militar camp in Rothenburg.

Rothemborg is one of the tipical german turistic attractions and there were lots of tourists as me.  It was nice to walk all around the town because there are no cars in Rothemburg. I visited a very interesting store where they sell cute chrismas decorations all year long and I also visited the KriminalMuseum, a place were I saw instruments of torture and penalties of shame and honour. There were very interesting pieces, like the ones used for problematic couples, used to chain husband and wife in a way they were facing each other but they could not fight. They were chained until they stopped complaining or yelling to each other.

KriminalMuseum in Rothemburg. Mask of shame, chastity belt and penalties for couples.

The next day I went to Nürnberg, a very historic city. Nürnberg was an important strondhold for the Nazi party and here were celebrated the huge nazi party conventions glorified in Nazi propaganda films before and during the World War II. At the end of the world, German officials involved in the Holocaust and other war crimes were taken in front of an international tribunal in Nürnberg.

Of course I visited the Reich Party Rally Grounds (Reichsparteitagsgelände)< where I could see the remains of the Zeppelin field used to review troops and the Gross Strasse. I’m not a big fun of museums but I also visited the Medieval Dungeons (Where they imprisoned people) and the Documentation Center at the Reich Party Rally Grounds (Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände). This last one was really interesting showing how the Nazis rose to power and how the Nazis fascinated the masses.

Zepelin Field. How it looked before World War II and how it looks now.

The city was completely bombed at the end of the World War II. After the war the old city and the most important landmarks were rebuilt. That’s the reason modern Nürnberg still has lots of medieval architecture and monuments . The nazi monuments were dismantled or even bombed and the remains are concentrated in a public park. They are still in use but instead of Romanic monuments to glorify the reich, now are normal streets, lakes, museums, a racing pod and a open concert park. In the inner city there are lots of interesting landmarks but the most important is the castle that dominates the entire city.

Top: Zeppelin field during huge nazi party conventions. Bottom: How it looks today

It was a nice trip and I want to come back because there are still some landmarks I couldn’t see. For example both the Nuremberg Underworld (Nürnberger Felsengänge) and the Courtroom 600 where the Nuremberg Trials were held, were closed.

Maybe I will come back in a few months, stay tuned!

Munich, at the right side Marienplatz and the Neues Rathaus

In the evening we took the train to Füssen. This small city is located at the end of the romantic road. The most beautiful German castles are only 3 kilometers away. We arrive in the night, so the next day in the morning we went to explore the beautiful castles Neuschwanstein and Hochschwangau. Neuschwanstein is a fairy-tale castle, known worldwide. It’s totally worth it to come here and enjoy the beautiful views of the castle and the beutiful background. Hochschwangau is directly across from Ludwig II’s fairy-tale castle. This castle served as Ludwig II’s home while he was growing up and it looks completely different from the Spanish ones. In general these two castles are architecturally more beautiful and with better decoration that but they are way smaller.

Hochschwangau castle

Beautiful view from inside the Neuschwanstein castle

In our way back, we explore Füssen for a few hours walking around in the streets and visiting he beautiful church. After that, we needed almost 6 hours in bus and train to return to Würzburg.

Neuschwanstein castle

In conclusion, It was a nice trip because the weather was fantastic and we were always on time everywhere. We were lucky because we decided our route a few hours before taking the first train. In consequence this has been my the first trip with almost no planning. And everything has resulted perfect! I’m now preparing my next weekend trips, there are still lots of interesting places in Germany!

Würzburg from the fortress

The first thing I notice once I arrived here was the COLD. I was used to hot and humid nights and the fresh COLD air was a surprise to me. I was freezing but the people was just wearing light clothes!. Another big difference I notice instantly, it was absolutely dark around 20:00!

After a couple of days visiting the city, I’m really surprised because I was expecting a small and boring city but this is a very beautiful and romantic city. It’s also very green, there are lots of trees and vegetation everywhere and most of the people appear to use bikes, and there are no cars in downtown. The buildings are short and the streets are narrow and clean. Everything looks… nice, which is a good contrast with Seoul. I was tired of the crappy saturated Korean streets.

Postcard-like picture of the city

The city is surrounded by hills. The main one has a huge castle. From there, you can see the entire city.I really like this mini city. It’s extremely romantic and cute,you can walk all over the city, there is no traffic and the air is incredible clear.

Jumping on Würzburg Residence (UNESCO)

I was checking 44Kg. Overweight fees were 700 EUR.

It was the first time I had that problem so at the beginning I was quite confused. After some minutes, I ran to the freighter company and shipped my backpack directly to Würzburg. I needed to take off lots of weight, throwing to the gargaje lots of old clothes and crappy shirts I bought in Korea and Taiwan. And my running shoes!

I paid 150Won for shipping the backpack (more or less 70EUR) and the hole process took 1 hour and a half. Thanks god I went early to the airport. Shipping was ten times cheaper than Lufthansa. Next time I will not need to decide anything!

Once I realized that looking for a job in Korea was not easy for me, I relaxed the bar and I restarted the job hunt. I started looking only in Asia but at the end I opened the circle until searching all over the world. The last stage was Europe because in Europe I didn’t need a working visa and I knew it was going to be way easier to find a job if the company didn’t needed to sponsor me. Soon after start looking in Europe a German company sent me an offer and I accepted it.

After coming back from Japan I had only had one week to say goodbye to Seoul and return to Europe. I spent the time walking around the city, sightseeing the important places in the city that I couldn’t visit yet and trying to store the streets, the lights and the smell of the city in my head.

I visited the main palace of the city, Gyeongbok-gung(경복궁,景福宮) palace. It was nice, but I was suffering Palace-fatigue. After living here for a while all the Korean palaces look exactly the same! Actually it happens the same problem with the churches in Europe. I went to the two main Korean Markets several times and I also visited the Seodaemun , created by the Japanese people the last time they invaded Korea at the beginning of the XX century. In this museum they have very creepy expositions in the real place where the prisoners were held.

I also visited once of the most representative buildings in Seoul. The 63 building. You can visit the top floor and enjoy a nice view of the city. Personally I thought it was more interesting the Hello Kittie Exposition that was in there than the sights. They are way better in the Seoul Tower. Actually we come back to the Seoul tower in my last night in Seoul to have a fantastic dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Seoul tower.

And after those magic moments in the last week, I got the plain and returned to Europe. My new house is in Würzburg, located between Frankfurt and Nürnberg in Franconia, Baviera.

And you will be always welcome here!

For example In Korea the police stations have cute big-eyed small cartoons welcoming you instead of serious information. Korean subways are completely cute. Even the KTX, the bullet train, used for top executives and serious people, is full of cute signs. The society is clearly influenced, In Korea is common for couples to match their clothing (They match their cellphones too!) and there are lots of stores that sell cute products.

Korea must be the country with a higher proportion of metro sexual men. Korean guys doesn’t care using things clearly designed for girls. They like to use cute hello kitty shirts and bags and they don’t have any problem using clothing and bags full of lovely hearts. They are really into the cosmetics too. In every other corner there is at least one cosmetic shop and all of them has sections for men.

Moreover Koreans live surrounded by love. Korean pop, movies and television shows are centered in the quest for the perfect partner. In consequence, Korean people are obsessed with finding a partner and finding real love. Everybody has somebody that consider a special friend with whom share experiences. In Spain a special friend has sexual connotations but in Korea is different, is more about discovering real love. Their society is not as liberal as us. In Korea, couples are always together holding hands but they don’t express publically their emotions kissing each other and they don’t practice sex until they really sure that the partners is a good catch. They don’t have one night stands. I also believe there isn’t an important gay community.

The picture is taken from the wikipedia, don't ask me what it means

Do you think Korean is complicated? It is, but not as much as you can think.
Korean looks crazy because the alphabet is strange, but once you overcome that difficulty you discover is way simpler than all of the other asian languages. As happen in English, Korean language is extremely precise and easy to learn. The pronunciation is not difficult for native English speakers. The grammar is easy because Koreans don’t use articles. Verbal conjugations are extremely difficult but they are really difficult even for them so they will never expect you to conjugate korean perfectly.

Said that, the language is easy to learn for kids, probably easier than English or Spanish is. But for full grown people is different because learning a completely different language with a new alphabet and a whole new set of  vocabulary is difficult without the correct motivation.

In my case there were no clear balance between effort and results and I never tried hard to master the language. I just relied in some easy  basic sentences. This is all the basic korean you need to survive in Seoul using Spanish phonetics!

• ‘Hello’  ‘Ángyon jaseyo’
• ‘Bye’  ‘Angyógni jaseyo’
• ‘Yes’  ‘Nee’
• ‘No’  ‘Annio’
• ‘Thanks’  ‘Gansahamida’
• ‘You are pretty’  ‘No chámb iéputa’

They have an alfabet. Hangul only have 10 vowels and 14 consonants. They combine them in groups of two or three to create sillabes, and they join between two and four sillabes to form a word.

The only really complex part of the language even for Korean people are the different degrees of politeness when speaking with the people. And is not as simple as in spanish, where we use a bit more polite conjugations and pronoms when speaking in a respectfull way. No. Korean language change completely. Pronombs, verbal conjugation… the whole sentence change!.

They need to take into consideration age and status of the other person.  They need to know that information and that’s the reason the first question a Korean always ask is how old are you. It is completely normal for them to ask that question, which is considered extremely rude in our side of the world. This is a bit of cultural shock, specially for girls.

Do I speak Korean?
No, not at all. I can read at a very slow pace. But I didn’t develop a vocabulary so I although I can read, I can’t understand what is written. Reading is easy because once you have clear the alphabet in your mind and you are able to recognize each one of the characters is easy to read text.

The huge problem is the vocabulary. Is completely different to Spanish or English so I needed to memorize a complete set of new words from the beginning.

There is another problem on top of that. The sounds. Even Korean pronunciation is very simple (thanks god it is not a tonal language) I have a very hard time trying to speak the language. My mother tongue (spanish) has a extremely simple phonetics. That means that without extensive training I can’t make (or recognize) the sounds I don’t have in my mother language and Korean vowel sounds are quite similar to each other. There are a couple of consonants I have a hard time to pronounce too.

Do I speak Japanese or Chinese?

No way. In my last month in Korea I was learning basic Korean, Japanese and Mandarin meeting different people in lenguage exchanges. I can’t speak any of the languages but at least I know how to say hello in all of them and I can easily differenciate the languages when I see them written or when I listen people speaking. I also know enough of three languages to say that Korean is the easiest by far. Japanese is extremely difficult to learn because they use 3 different written scripts (Hiragana, Karakana and Kanji).  and Chinese has two problems. On one hand, they don’t use an alphabet but a symbol system that is extremely complicated. On the other hand Chinese is a tonal language, which means that they can say the same word with different meanings depending of the (extremely subtle) differences in the pronunciation.