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.

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.

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 vegetables wrapped 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!

The night culture is completely different. In Korea it is completely normal and accepted to be completely drunk at night (even in the mornings) and the people only care when drunk people start fighting with each other or puking in the streets. In Japan people drink a lot but not as much. We only saw one drunk man and the people were completely annoyed with him.

About the language, It was very strange for me to discover that Korean people speak better English than Japanese. Japan has been always more foreign friendly and there are lots of foreigners in Japan but it seems that they are more attached to their language and culture than Koreans.

The cities look completely different. Korean streets are always packed with lots of stores and restaurants in the main floor. Furthermore the Korean streets are full of signs. The Japanese streets are cleaner, don’t have as many signs (only in the trendy districts) and they don’t have as many stores and restaurants. Also the restaurants and stores have a lot more style. Most of the Korean stores are clearly familiar businesses, while in Japan they look like in Europe. The Korean ones are always cheaper.

I start speaking about prices. Japan is not as expensive as it was before. Of course is still the most expensive country in Asia and for example most of the things cost twice as in Korea, but it is still cheap in comparison with the broken Spanish economy.

In Japan the manga obsession is a completely different chapter. There is manga for all kind of people. There is manga for kids, for teenagers, for blue collar workers, for housewives, for executives and I’m pretty sure there is also manga for old people. In Japan manga is considered another form of literature and the topics are surprinsingly various although in the magazines there are always pretty girls with tight clothes on the front covers. It’s interesting that Japanese people read books and magazines starting from what in my occidental perspective is the back cover so they flip the pages from the left to the right. This is another example of why in Japan everything is upside down.

About the language, they use what can be the most bizarre written language ever. They combine 2 different Japanese scripts (Katakana and Hiragana) with Chinese (Kanji) words. It must be a very complicated language to master. In spite of that, the pronunciation is pretty simple and compatible with English speakers. It’s not as easy for me, but all of you know my limitations with phonetics and singing.

After visiting the country I can say that I really like it, and it’s a very nice country to live… if you have the money!

The peculiarity of the island is that there is only one road and it is open only when the tide is down. We arrived on the island on time and we were sightseeing, walking around the port and the beach and the main attractions. There were like tons of restaurants on the beach and we chose one random place to have lunch. We paid 22000 wons each for what was the best mariscada I ever had! Definitively,Korea is a good place to live if you love seafood.

While we were having dinner, the tide went up, and by the time we tried to return to Seoul, the bridge was closed. So we stayed trapped on the island for 4 hours, laying on the beach talking about our lives. That was a very good way of knowing these people!

Mud-Showered

There were lots of Koreans but this place is specially attractive for foreigners because they don’t care about getting muddy. I think that approximately 50% of the people were foreigners, out of them probably 90% were ESL teachers.

The main attraction of the festival is the mud. Huge quantities of mud. Grey, sticky, oily and dirty mud. It’s a lot of fun and is also supposed to be very healthy being this mud is essentially the same mud you can find in the expensive spas.

The feeling of the mud is greasy. You can swim in the mud or paint your body when it is still wet. It takes like 15 minutes to dry on your skin. After that you look like a statue. And there is a plus advantage, the mud is the perfect sun protector!

Hitting on the Mudfest woman

Apart of the mud buffet where you can paint yourself, there were also giant slides, a mud jail, a soccer game and several mudfighting rings. I couldn’t try the slides but the rings were a lot of fun.

Other activities were dancing under the mud rain and color painting. As this is Korea, while we were covering our skin we were eating large quantities of Korean food and drinking a lot of soju.

Recently I visited the South Korean Joint Security Area. It was a interesting trip discovering the last frontier of the cold war and my second experience with North Korea. Before being allowed to enter the JSA, I was given a briefing during which I signed a document which states, in part, “The
visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action”.

JSA. In the back Panmungak which is the North Korean side.
This picture was taken from the pagoda in the South Korean side.

Once in the JSA, It was very interesting to be in the MAC Conference Room, the famous room where the peace negotiations took place. This room is the only place where you can be in South Korea and North Korea at the same time. The Military Demarcation Line runs underneath this room so technically you can cross over into North Korea!.

Inside the MAC Conference Room

I also have the opportunity to see the other notable landmarks within the JSA as the Bridge of No Return and the place where there was the tree where the Axe Murder Incident of 1976 took place. James Bond (aka Pierce Brosnan) crossed this bridge in a scene from Die Another Day. This bridge was used to exchange prisoners after the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Bridge of no return

I also saw from the distance the North Korean “Propaganda Village” and the world’s tallest flagpole. The flag must be taken down when it is raining as its immense weight cannot be supported by the tower.

In summary, this has been my more cultural and historic visit in South Korea. It was extremely interesting to see with my own eyes one of the world’s most heavily defended borders of the Cold War and the scenario where lots of recent historic events have took place is an unforgettable experience.

In the second week of July we had been two days in North Korea hiking Mount Kungang. It was not a real adventure. You can’t visit North Korea on your own, you must always go there with a tourist group and people related to the government always looking over your shoulder. That way they can control what you are doing and where you are and they can be sure that you don’t do anything inappropriate like speaking with normal people.

North Korea regime is the last communist state, widely totalitarian and considered to be a dictatorship where the main actor is Kim Il-sung, the country’s former leader. The current leader is Kim Jong-il, the late president Kim Il-sung’s son. The two of them are constantly present in huge mosaics all around the country. All the north Korean population wear a pin with the picture of the leader over the North Korea Flag.

This video was produced to remember the trip

When we crossed the South Korean border we entered in another world. There were North Korean soldiers standing perfectly silent every 500 meters. Soldier’s uniforms seems old, similar to the Russian uniform we are used to seeing in the cold-war era movies. North Korea has the fourth largest army in the world because close to 70% of the population can be called to arms if it is necessary.

North Korea is a natural paradise, when we enter the country we were shocked because it is very beautiful. Part of the charm is that there is no industry. At least in the area we visited, we could only see huge rice fields and small villages. Most of the villages didn’t have medium size familiar houses but only huge grey buildings. I suppose entire families are living under the same roof. We saw people working in the fields, normally by hand, sometimes with the help of animals. We only saw one tractor.

The area were we where residing is called 금강산 which is the tourist resort section in North Korea managed by Hyundai. In Spain we only know Hyundai motors but in reality it is a huge South Korean corporation (although recently it was divided in small pieces). The Mount Kumgang resort is the centerpiece of South Korean efforts to engage and invest in the North as a strategy to reduce hostilities along the world’s most militarized border. Hyundai’s founder is a North Korean and he has always been an important figure regarding the reunification of the countries. Indeed, the last day we were there, it was reunification day and there was a huge meeting in the resort celebrating the anniversary of the first reunification encounter after the Korean War.

Of course the most interesting views are when you leave the resort and are taken by bus to the nearby natural attractions. It’s supposed to be a clear area but you are not allowed to take pictures anyway. It’s easy know why taking into consideration we saw several tanks and rocket launchers in several close hills.

As I mention before every 500 meters or so there is an army member standing and controlling the area. I don’t know if this happens only in the closest areas to the resort or in the entire country. It seems that they are there to prevent the foreigners to go to restricted areas and to prevent the North Korean people to enter the resort. It may also be that the entire country is divided in small cells and every day one different civilian wears the military suit. That day he is responsible for controlling the people in the area and that can be the general idea, everybody is controlled by their own neighbors.

Returning to our trip, we hiked a beautiful mountain named mount Kumgang that is considered one of the most beautiful of the entire Korea. It was scary, especially close to the end. But it was amazing to see the old Korean women suffering a lot while climbing to the top. they had incredible strength and very strong will. In a very scary point I wanted to quit (I suffer vertigo) but when I saw a bunch of 50 year old women passing me, I realized that if they could do it, I must be able to do it too.

The next day we were exhausted and we went for a walk to the sea and the lake. It was a beautiful walk and we had the opportunity to speak with North Korean people. Most of them were creepy but some of them were really friendly and interested in our culture. I’m pretty sure none of them know where Spain is but all of them were smiling friendly anyway.

It was a very interesting trip in a very interesting country. Next stop, Japan!