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.
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.
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.
Before coming to Korea I thought korean people were quite small. I was completely wrong. Korean people is at least as tall as Spaniards and way thinner. It’s hard to see fat Koreans and impossible to see huge obese Koreans. After living in Seoul for 4 months I’ve only seen two fat Korean guys.
It may be the food or the lifestyle but I think they simply genetically designed to be thin.
Korean people are really concerned about their physical aparence, women and men alike. Women are constantly checking their hair and they always carry with them a mirror. Something interesting that I’ve never seen in any other place is that there are always full sized mirrors in the subway stations and the people use them constantly to verify that they look good before going to street level. Actually, they take advantage of the few seconds waiting in lines in the subway or to correct their (always present, and always perfect and simple) makeup.
Girls use high heels all the time, including places where a European girl will never use them (ie, in the beach) and when they reach a certain age, they start wearing huge visors to protect their faces from the sun. A medium age Korean girl seems machines, extremely thinner, always wearing huge visors, high heels and huge handbags.
Korean girl wearing a huge visor to protect her face from the sun
Korean people are obsessed with well-being products, the markets are full of healthy/eco-friendly and green products. They also have lots of vitamin enriched drinks you can’t find in Europe. Caring about other’s health is important, the health of their family and friends it’s a serious concern for them and fruit, vitamins and mineral enriched products are the best presents you can give to other Koreans when you are visiting their homes.
All together made the koreans look younger than they really are. It’s common to see hot and sexy women that appear to be in their 20′ and discover than they are really in their 40′. The combination of the healthy diet, the cosmetics and genetics make very difficult to guess the real age of the people.
In Korea eating food is a social act. They get together and have meals watered with huge amounts of alcohol. They don’t meet together in their small houses, working 9 to 10 hours a day they don’t have time to cook their complicated cuisine and they don’t have the space to meet a buch of people comfortably. Instead, Korean cities has lots and lots of small and familiar cheap restaurants. The Korean Barbaque style of restaurant is very popular. Here you order meat or seafood and sidedishes and cook yourself the food using a common barbaque integrated in the middle of the table. Cooking and eating is a slow process and meanwhile, people discuss and speak about their life the same way we Europeans tend to do the same around cups of cofee.
Spicy
If I need to describe Korean food with an adjetive, the correct word is spicy. In Korea use red peppers and cayenne to add depth and boost the taste. This is common all around Asia and for them is completely normal and in fact European food is too plain for them. In Spain cuisine is usually sweet or neutral, and it’s never too spicy. In result, most of Korean dishes were quite spicy for me but after a couple of weeks I started adjusting and after a month I started appreciating the taste. Now I cook spicy myself and I really like the flavour boost spicy spices add to the food.
Meat
Korean food is based around meat but meat is never the main part of the dish. They use small portions to add texture and flavour, but they don’t eat meat in huge quantities like we do in Europe. Meat is pretty expensive in Korea because is imported from New Zealand or Australia. Pork and chicken is what Koreans usually eat. Beef is freaking expensive and is only eaten in really small quantities or in special ocassions.
Rice
In Korea the diet is rice based, which means that all the dished have huge amounts of rice or at least they are served with rice as a sidedish. For example, the bibimbap, one of the most famous dishes is a tasty mix of vegetables and egg over a big amount of rice.
This is Bibimbam, one of the most popular Korean dishes between foreigners and Koreans alike
Korean Fast Food: Kimbap
Koreans are obsessed with Well-being, being well being food all the food they market as healthly. They are really serious about this. There are basically no fat Koreans and most of them are pretty fit. Of course there are American Fast Food stores, but the products they sell in there look better in comparaison to American or Canadian ones. There are also Korean style fast food. In Korea there are restaurants in every street and in all of them you can order a Kimbap as fast food. Kimbap is a roll of rice with vegetableswrapped on seaweed. More complex versions have also tuna, egg or ham. It’s the Korean version of a California Roll, but here is extremely cheap (In regular restaurants, small ones cost 0,60 eur and huge ones 2 eur). You can buy Kimbaps as snacks or complete meals easily all around Korea and they are fast, tasty, easy to buy and eat on the go and way healthier than hamburguers and hot dogs.
Soups
They eat lots of rice but not everything has rice. The other main kind of dishes are soups. They have lots of them, Kimchi soup, Pork soup, Fish soup, Rice cake soup, Chicken Soup, Ginseng Soup… each one of them diferent of the other, but all of them tasty. They used lots of spices. In Korea I basically discovered soups and I realized I like them. In Spain we don’t appreciate soups, we don’t have variety and most of them are considered as a cheap dish or a way to use left overs.
Fish and seafood
Taking into consideration they are a nation almost completely sorrounded by seas as Spain, they as much fish as we do. What is different is the way is processed and transported. The animal is always alive the moment you buy it in the market or you order it in the restaurant. In the markets and in the restaurants they have huge tanks with the fishes swimming freely instead of clean and dead animals on the counter. They probably can do that because the sea is never more than 150km away while in Spain there are areas far away from the ports. But there is no reason we can’t do the same in martkets close to the ports. Maybe is a health inspection issue but I feel it’s better the Korean way because I think the fish is always going to be fresher than if you buy it already dead. In some markets you can even eat the fish raw seconds later buying it. The clerk will prepare the fish for you at the moment and it will be served almost over the counter.
That's how you buy fish in Markets in Korea
Fish is quite expensive thought, so they eat huge quantities of seafish, specially calamary and octopus. When I say huge is not a joke, most of the dishes have some kind of seafood and they are so used to it that they even have seafood taste snaks. Actually, calamary is a snack, you can buy dry calamary in any convenience store and eat it the same way we eat pumpkin seeds in Europe. It taste horrible, but they like it.
In the video you can see how I ate octopus in Busan in the company of several CouchSurfers. The octopus was alive, because we were eating it seconds after it was cutted. It tasted very good.
Sidedishes
One peculiarity of the Korean food is that is always served with several sidedishes. These are designed to give the correct proportion of diferent flavours and tastes. One of the sidedishes is always kimchi, the most famous Korean food.
We cook kimchi thanks to Ginny, a korean friend that invited us to her home to cook korean food with his parents. (Thanks Ginny!)
Kimchi is prepared with fish stock,lots and lots of red pepper and several other spices. Then you spread the spicy red paste over vegetables, usually cabbage. After that, they are refrigerated for several days. In the old days, Kimchi was the way to preserve vegetables during the winter. They prepared it in the fall and then buried it in holes in the earth. This is a pretty interesting similarity with our spanish embutidos like chorizo and jamon but what Korean people are preserving is vegetables instead of meat.
Pastry
Apart of the normal food, Koreans enjoy amazingly good cakes. The traditional desserts are rice cakes which are more or less the same thing than the japanese ones. They also have amazing birthday cakes which taste really good and are very healthy (You can tell they are not fat and they are made for example with green tea)
I don’t really like rice cakes but they are a good snack. One of them fill you up. Korean’s are currently influenced by European style pastry. There are tons of European Style bakeries and you can buy all kind of good cakes, bread and sandwishes cheaply and almost 24/7.
The korean food is healthy, spicy and with a very unique taste. You need to visit Korea to try it!
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