The trip to Cologne was my first hitchhiking experience ever. My host was Barbara, a German girl able to mix flawlessly Spanish and South American slang. She speaks better Spanish than me!. In Cologne I visited the cathedral. It’s massive, it looks big from outside and it’s huge once you are inside. The cathedral was full of tourists so it was not such an amazing experience. I miss the Hindu temples in India were only locals are on the temple instead of tourists taking pictures!

In the top of the biggest cathedral in Germany (Ulm cathedral was taller!)

With Barbara, my CS host in Köln and Cataldo, the espontaneous surfer

My hitchhiking sign to Frankfurt (The original idea was Frankfurt-Strasbourg but I did Frankfurt-Köln)

Köln massive cathedral

More interesting than the overhyped cathedral was the Chocolate Museum. It has a tropical section with real cocoa trees and a very nice exposition about how cocoa was used in America as food and currency before the Spanish arrived and how cocoa is nowadays cultivated in tropical areas all over the world. The best part of the museum is the small factory where they make their own chocolate bars and chocolate candy!

Munich

I went to Munich for a visit to the Spanish consulate. I hitchhiked to Munich on a bus full of Tamil people that went to Munich for a demonstration to raise awareness about the Sri Lankan war. How random is that? I must have a strange connection with that country. It was fun to say “hello” “my name is david” and “thank you” in Tamil, this people were not used to europeans speaking their language and it was very interesting to see their reactions.

Frankfurt

I went to Frankfurt to play a scavenger hunt game on the city. It was a lot of fun because the task list forced us to move around downtown with concrete objetives: Locate the naked man, make a human chain from this statue to the other… It was nice to walk around downtown Frankfurt paying attention to the street and the people. I really want to organize a similar game in Würzburg!

These are some test pictures I took on my first week. There is such a massive improvement over my crappy compact camera that I wonder how come I didn’t bought a DSLR before. Now and I have the basic gear and I only need to improve so I ask for tips and tricks to every photographer I met!

Wide lenses test

Macro test

Sunset light test

Night photography test (yep, I'm still missing a small tripod)

In comparison I’m in such stage on life I don’t have any consistent objetive in my life. My beliefs and goals change faster than my environment. I’m curious about everything, there are tons of interesting skills to have or topics to learn about.

Is this a problem?

It’s really easy to influence me to change my beliefs and life goals. When I read something that seems logical I accept what is written for granted without further thinking. The consequence: what I think about a topic today can be totally different tomorrow.

My mind is extremely open minded and lazy. It’s easier to accept what others think than work to have a personal opinion. Not only I have very bad memory but sometimes I have extremely simple thoughts. Most of the time my thoughts are similar to Homer Simpson’s than Goethe’s.

In consequence I don’t have strong personal opinions about anything. I’m a son of Internet, suffering an information overload, reading too much and not spending enough time to ask myself what is my real opinion about what I’m reading.

Do you have the same problem?

All of those places had in common one thing. I was living with other people. My apartment in Würzburg is my first place of my own.

Apartment in Würzburg

Now I have mats on the floors instead of massive amounts of dust. I have boxes filled with stuff instead of big piles of stuff. I have clear walls instead of circuit boards hanging from the wall. And I have stuff that has no other reason to be there than look nice.

It’s not a secret that I have no style. I’m a square headed male engineer and I have a pure analytical mind. I appreciate functionality over style. When I tried to decorate something the result is always a mess. I really like how the pictures look on decoration magazines, but I was not able to create nice spaces combining shapes and colors by my own.

This time I had the opportunity to take over Janette’s apartment. She worked for a decoration company on the last years and according to her, this place is her personal masterpiece. It really looks clean and nice. Zen. After taking out all her pink stuff , her princess palace become my apartment.

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.

After one month of hard work, I’ve happily won the contest.

You can continue reading in my technical blog how the awards ceremony was

Randy transmits in only 10 minutes a lot of energy. He want the people to improve their mindset, refocus their priorities looking at the bottom of their hearths to find what is really important in life. He also mention perseverence is the key to sucess and how you should live your life: Always having fun everyday in every single action. Which has been also my mantra in the last times.

I really have enjojed this lecture and I’ve seen that although Randy has so time left, he has written a book (The Last Lecture) that seems also very interesting and motivational. The following video is the lecture he prepared for their sons. “I think it’s great that so many people have benefited from this lecture, but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t really even give it to the 400 people at Carnegie Mellon who came. I only wrote this lecture for three people, and when they’re older, they’ll watch it,”

Watch it with a clear mind.

Thanks Jaimi for let me know this stuff.

Until then, I always had been a super healthy guy and I had never have real health problems but since that summer, It’s pretty easy for me to get a cold. Doctors told me that I have the throat cells in very bad state because the tissue is too folded which means it’s a perfect substrate for bacteria. They also told me that the muscular tissue will be recovered in a year if I prevent my throat to become infected again. But I’ve been having small colds since then every three months. I will need to have a lot more care in the future…

The last weeks I had been playing with wordpress for Idatel, preparing a system to use wordpress as a backend for the edition of the main website. While I was working on it I realized that maybe wordpress also can be a good platform for my blog which nowadays is using Blosxom, a ultra simplistic blog engine perfect for me in the last years but too old fashioned for me right now. Blosxom is starting to show too much limitations and actually the userbase is migrating to wordpress at a very fast rate.

Installing a new wordpress seems to be the perfect solution in the short run as I dont want to mix posts in spanish and english in david.grajal.net and Blosxom don’t offer me a simple way to support two languages without suffering a time costly data migration by hand. Plus in that way I will learn how wordpress works and I will experience the pros and cons of a possible future migration of my site.

In short, these are the things I have been doing with my laptop, writing in English and starting a new site which can be the seed for the future version of the blog.These posts are the state of the art in David’s imagination, I’m not sure what topics I will choose to speak, so I don’t know what you reader can expect for this blog. We will see.

I hope to have the will to continue writing and don’t get stuck and to improve my skills or at least prevent lost them.