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?

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.

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)

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 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.

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.