en.david.grajal

Finally on Würzburg!

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)

On my trip from Korea to Europe I had a bad experience at the airport. I thought that my luggage allowance was 2 bags of 20kg each, same allowance as long haul flights between Korea and US and Japan/China with Europe. However between Korea and Europe is different and my real luggage allowance was 20kg maximum.

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!

I’ve been living in Seoul for the last 4 months. Soon after arriving here, I started to look for a job in the city. I was relaxed but I spent two months searching without luck. The problem was that I didn’t have a work Visa, neither I had a lot of demonstrable experience or completely focused skills and I didn’t know any Korean.

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!

The cuteness is something characteristic of the Japanese culture that also has been influenced in Korea. The cuteness doesn’t stand out at the beginning, but after a while it’s overwhelming. Korean society is cute. They use cute things/signs in places that in our society would be considered immature. Lots of companies have cute mascots to present themselves to the people. When you are walking in the streets you are surrounded by cuteness, starting by the Korean fashion but also, the sings, colors and lifestyle. It seems really estrange, it’s like when I started using Windows XP with the duplo default theme. In Europe we are use to serious stuff and It’s quite difficult to accept cuteness in important things.

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.

This is how a word in korean looks like:

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.