tintiiin

Here we are, waiting and preparing. Hoping, with one half of my heart and mind that time would fly by, or at least that one week would fly by really quickly. The other half on the other hand demands a slowly development, in order to realize and grasp what will come. Personally, I believe that the second option here is potentially the most logical one, but at the same time very unrealistic. Truth is, you hardly will understand what’s going on until you’re in the middle of it, if even at that time.

What will happen in a week is that I go to Seoul, South Korea. Luckily not alone, but with my boyfriend. We’ll study there for a couple of months and then go on with exploring the rest of the country, and most likely also Japan. It’s really hard to grasp. I am surrounded with papers and documents, recently sorted in different piles; insurances, grades transcripts, admission papers, miscellaneous. Fun thing is, I also have copies of those documents on my folders in the computer. And the most important ones are also saved in the e-cloud. While the anxiety is growing, my organizing grows more frequent, and structured, and notorious. Poor BF. He is basically the opposite, keeping calm and relaxed. Good for him I say.

So, Seoul, what do we know about it? Let’s see the trends I’ve spotted so far:

• It’s hot, trendy. Everywhere I look (read Swedish newspapers and magazines) more and more attention is directed on the food, the culture, the innovation, the school system etc. in South Korea, namely Seoul.
• The country is in the forefront of innovation and technical solutions in order to create a sustainable urban life. They have road-powered buses, very efficient public transport, electronic solutions to a lot, and more. Plus, the UN office for sustainable development is situated in Incheon, just next to Seoul.
• There is (in my opinion) a very interesting combination of development, innovation and fresh thinking and hierarchy. The peninsula is home to the Confucianism tradition, which entails, among other ideas, a strong hierarchy. Elder people, people with different positions, people you know or not, they all are entitled different greetings ant different ways of paying respect. How does that work with innovation and new thinking? Let me come back to you on that one.
• Koreans work a lot. They do ore hours a week than most of us, spare time does not exist.
• They are genuinely helpful, and apparently they appreciate whenever foreigners try to speak Korean, hence the very structured and diverse rules of the languages deriving from their hierarchal traditions seem not to be applicable for non-Koreans. (Pew!)
• Their alphabet (based on characters just as Mandarin and Japanese) is supposedly easy to learn. I have started to explore the characters and the way they construct words (or rather syllables). I wouldn’t say it’s easy but, no, not as hard as I imagined. Lacking skills in other character-based languages I cannot argue how Hangul (the name of the Korean alphabet) is more or less easy than any other alphabet of the kind. Whenever I’ve learnt Korean and, let’s say Mandarin, I get back to you on that one too (yeah, riiiight!).

More or less, let’s evaluate and experience, handle the stress and keep sorting paper ‘til time’s up and flight’s leaving!