David Grajal

Today I’ve left home, my comfortable life, family and friends. I left everything behind to start living in South Korea, far away from home, with Ann. I will need to learn a new language and the rules of the korean society. Make my life harder but also more interesting. I will change, making myself more open minded. Today I’ve started a new stage in my life and I don’t know when I will come back to Spain.

I’m so happy

Spanish ‘Pato’ bullet train

I’ve come to Madrid on AVE (the Spanish bullet train) in one of the nicest trips of my life. I took the train and I started to explore its cool features, specially the bar because it has huge windows and the speed sensation is amazing. The train was not full and I took advantage of that sitting for a while in first class. When I returned from my small walk we were already crossing Guadarrama!. I arrived Madrid soon after, so it was a 200km, 51 minutes trip that usually takes close to 3 hours in the regular train.

In the afternoon I’ve been having dinner and saying goodbye to some good friends. Leticia, Diego, Maria and Gonzalo, who just returned yesterday from his Rumanian erasmus (It’s funny, he come back the same week I’m moving away)

Crushing into pieces South Korea soccer team

This weekend I’ve come to Madrid, to visit some friends and to meet Juan García, a Telefonica I+D engineer who worked on Movistar Contacta, a Facebook application with same functionality of my Call for free with Simio. He wanted me to work for him as freelance, an idea who has been rounding my head for some time and it’s becoming a serious option for me right now.

Today I’ve been visiting my old University and helped my old roommates to ‘upgrade’ their Wii to play Mario Galaxy. This have been my first time playing Mario Galaxy and it has been a lot of fun. It’s so much better than Mario Sunshine.

Problem is, I arrived Madrid’s Chamartin train station too late and I’ve had the most frustrating experience in my life: I arrived just in time to see how my train was leaving the station. Shit!. I rushed to the machines to buy a ticket for another train but the last bullet train was complete. Shit!

So I rushed all the city down to Madrid’s South Bus Station to get a bus to Valladolid but by the time I’ve arrived, there were no available seats until the bus at 1:30am. Shit!

So I’m writing this post while seated in a corner of the station because I need to wait 3 hours for the bus. I’m making fun of myself, basically I’m trapped in Madrid because I wanted to play Mario Galaxy. Meanwhile, I’m speaking with a 18 years old german guy who come last year to study mathematics on Salamanca’s University. A very interesting guy indeed… You need to be very brave to come to Spain with 18 years, without knowing the languaje to start a regular university course.

The German guy just leave to Salamanca and now I’m with an Hungarian guy who is waiting for a girl. He doesn’t understand Spanish, not even English and has been an odyssey to understand that he want me to lend him some money to call the girl. Lost in translation. I’m thinking… this same is also going to happen to me when in Korea.

It’s a lot of fun to be seated in a corner looking what happen around with all the people moving forward their lives. 90% of them are a mix of hungarians, rumanians and africans. There are several überhot brazilian girls (high-heeled!) walking around too. It’s like being in an airport but without glamour. It’s a lot of fun to be here

And now I’m seated in the bus on my way to Valladolid. I’ve been the last hour walking around in the station, discovering the underworld hidden under the scenes. I’ve been reading about the crazy 2 days and a half journey across Europe Polish and Ucranian people need to suffer to arrive here. I also have a disgusting experience while in the washroom with an old man who was masturbating by my side.

I’ve been ‘playing‘ with a automatic machine designed to print your pictures and I discovered the machine copy all the pictures of the media inserted (trough memory sticks, memory cards, IRDA, bluetooth or CD) to their internal hard disk. It has been interesting to see the collection of pictures stored by the machine. Portraits, lots of pictures of babies, a lot of pictures of the security team of the station, and some very sensual pictures. Bed pictures. Nothing explicit, thought. I think I’m going to stop using print machines until they have better security measures!

But the best discover has been a strange vending machine. It’s located in an isolated area and appear to be a normal machine, but it’s the selection of products what made it special. You can buy here condoms, lubricant, vibrators, tampons or sanitary towels. If you are hungry you can also buy baby’s food or breakfast cereals. Amazingly, price is cheaper than in pharmacy! It would be a good place to buy if I weren’t unsure of how frecuently they change the products, thought.

UPDATE

This is a picture of the strange vending machine. It was taken with my cell so the quality is awful.

This weekend I’ve been in Madrid and I seized the opportunity to visit the new building built for La Caixa’s cultural activities. I visited also a exposition about religious Italian painters.

I really don’t care about the paintings (It’s pretty boring for me to see one ofter another these days) but I really loved the building, especially the idea of the vertical garden. It’s so cool to have a fresh living wall instead of a boring grey one!

And the building is so interesting too, because they use an old building as base and created a new one respecting the soul of the old one but making it way nicer and modern.

As we were on easter week, there were some holy week processions and I had the opportunity to see ‘la castellana’ and ‘gran via’ closed, only open for pedestrians and without traffic. It’s very nice to walk around the main streets without traffic because you can focus on the buildings and you always discover new faces of the same old thing.

Here is the topic that it’s dividing more the spanish society than the national elections we had last week. Our candidate for Eurovision song contest 2008. El Chiqui Chiqui. The Chiqui Chiqui is a extreme freak song produced and promoted from the Buenafuente tv show. Rodolfo Chiquilicuatre is a fiction character played by a comedian and the song was designed in a couple of days by the show’s scriptwritters. At the beginning it was only a joke, only a way to make fun of the eurovision contest. Today, all the people is dancing the Chiqui Chiqui.

How it sounds? The rhythm is reggaeton with funny stupid dance steps, the lyric is crazy. Here is the videoclip of the original version (english dubbed). The lyric Rodolfo will sing in the competition it’s cleaner but it’s also longer with new english verses.

Chiqui Chiqui song is a huge success probably because it was promoted and backed by a entire national channel but also because it has been seriously pushed through internet marketing up to the point of become a social phenommenom. Chiqui Chiqui is our best example of viral marketing. I’ve seen yoda dancing Chiki Chiki, a secondlife version, the teletubbies, all the simpson’s characters, counter-strike terrorists, michael jackson, hundreds of freaks, a CSI character, a WOW giant, bush, stevie of family guy and tens of other fan created versions.

How it is possible this song is representing us? A couple of months ago it was determined that this year our national representative was going to be elected through internet polls using a special myspace site. Tons of videoclips were uploaded, some of them of traditional or pop songs and music but mayority of them were home made and were totally freak.

The Chiqui Chiqui was almost always liderating the poll and recently has finally won the competition. But menwhile was necessary to accept thousands of bad critics, the rejection of the hardcore traditional eurovision journalists and the modification of the rules to make it lose votes.

Our society is splitted. There are people how loves Chiqui Chiqui because as we are going to lose anyway, at least we can enjoy a funny moment and make some laughts. But there is also the people how understand the competition as a very serious european simbol where each country present the best it can and they disagree with the freak show it’s becoming.

In the last years the eastern new republics started to present freak people. This year there is our Spanish Chiqui Chiqui but there is also a puppet turkey representing Ireland.

I love Chiqui Chiqui. And I’m not the only one, look at the TOP poll at the official fan website.

If Chiqui Chiqui wins the competition Spain will collapse. Seriously.

Today I went to “Museo Reina Sofia” in Madrid to see a temporal exposition about Picasso. It was interesting because the museum bring together lots of paintings normaly located in Paris and we could see a compact exposition with paints and sculptures of all the different stages of Picasso.What I dislike about this exposition is that it only showed paintings but there was no reference about the historical context in which they were painted, something critical in Pablo Picasso. There was nothing, not even a bibliography or historical reference of what “El Guernica” represents.

Nevertheless I learnt several interesting things. For example I always thought that Picasso was a cubism painter since the first moment he start painting but that’s not true. In his first years he painted like in the same way as all the others painters in their period. He suffer a progression and needed several years to invent cubism progressing from realistic forms to geometric forms.

The more interesting paint is without doubt “El Guernica” and the Museum devote lots of space to it. But I also liked two small paints about “The dream and reality of Franco”, one paint similar to “Fusilamientos del 2 de mayo” of Goya but themed in the Korean war and several small draws about explicit sex.