Seoul snapshots II

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Where old meets new

I just came back from my free day in Seoul. Luckily or not, it was the sunnier and colder day since I arrived. At 3pm, the temperature was around -2°C: under the sun, it was kind of nice; on the shadow or when the wind blown, it felt much colder and… not at all nice! My tour started at the Jongmyo Royal Ancestral Shrine, which houses the tablets of the Joseon Dynasty kings and queens and is the venue for ritual ceremonies to them. The 1st Sunday of May is the day to go there, because it is the day of the once-a-year ceremony, which includes strict procedures, colourful costumes, music and dances, but the place is worth a visit even on the last Thursday of January. After that, I moved towards the Changdeokgung Palace, which was built in the 15th century as a secondary palace, but served as the main palace between 1610 and 1868, until Gyeongbokgung was finally rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire during the Japanese invasion of 1592. Changdeokgung is the best preserved and representative of the Korean royal palaces, and includes one of the most enchanting sites I have ever visited: Huwon, The Secret Garden. After the Cultural Heritage tour, I strolled around the busy streets of Seoul and indulged myself with a second visit to Lotte Department Store and the area around Deoksugung Palace, including the Sungnyemun Gate. Back in the hotel, the only bad news is that Giuseppe is still sick… poor him… seems that the Tuesday meeting’s effects were nastier than I first thought…

Seoul snapshots I

Dialogue as a brand...

The day even started well… I woke up already past 7.30am, I managed to check my emails and have breakfast in a relaxed mood, and then we went to the centre and were lucky enough to watch, by complete chance, the Changing of the Royal Guard Ceremony at the Daehanmun gate of the Deoksugung Palace. Since we were in a good mood, but taking into account the freezing cold, we decided to get in and visit Korea’s most famous shopping mecca: Lotte Department Store. According to magazine Monocle, “there are a number of reasons why people shop at Lotte but one is exceptional service”. I could add some more. The prices aren’t exactly low, but it is true that the store leaves a good impression and makes one dream of perusing the 13 floors of retail heaven before leaving with lots of white and gold paper carrier bags! After waking-up from the dream, we went to the basement, where fresh fish is displayed to perfection in the buzzing food hall, alongside exquisitely packed fruits, teas and Korean rice sweets, and had a nice Korean meal. The worst was still to come… Back in the hotel we started the formal meeting with our partners to prepare the event that we are supposed to run together later in summertime. Don’t even know how to explain it… but I guess you will understand my frustration if I tell you that, after seven hours of meeting, we’re back at square one… it’s amazing how small cultural differences when approaching problems and seeking for solutions can disturb a discussion so much! Asian tendency to avoid public conflicts and always search for harmony even when two completely opposite visions are being discussed, doesn’t always seem very efficient, at least to European eyes. And diplomacy doesn’t always mean to be nice and smiling and definitely not reconciling… I normally tend to star the conflicts myself, as I am very… straight-forward, let’s say… so, today, it was kind of strange to be on the other side… keeping calm, avoiding the core of the discussion, refraining from replying to the unfair accusations thrown at me and at the European Youth Forum… The meeting concluded by an agreement on the need for another meeting… which means that my planned visit to Bulguksa temple had to be cancelled… and that annoys me a lot!

Globalisation is a tricky thing

After a long flight across eight time-zones, the worst thing that can happen to me is to be stuck in a car for around four hours… and that’s exactly what happened to me yesterday! On Sunday, didn’t do much more than a short walk around the hotel, in the area of Itaewon, and a nice dinner in a cosy Korean neighbourhood restaurant. The first impression left by Korean cuisine was quite pleasant and Seoul looked like an interesting and cosmopolitan place to be. Yesterday, after an early wake-up and meeting Giuseppe for breakfast shortly after 7am, we were invited to enter the car and sit for two hours while we were driven to Goesan, which is located somewhere south of Seoul, in the middle of nowhere. After visiting the facilities of the Youth Centre and having an interesting and very traditional lunch there, we came back to Seoul and visited the meeting rooms of the Hotel where we are staying. After that, we were left alone and, after some rest, we took the subway and went to the centre. After wondering for a while around Jongno-gu, we decided to take a taxi and asked to be dropped in Samcheong-dong. Samcheong-dong is an evolved and luxurious street, youthful and at the same ancient, which kept its famous tea houses, its serenity and peaceful ambiance, while becoming full of modern restaurants, bars and art galleries. Even though tempted by the huge amount of signs announcing Belgian waffles, we decided to try a small, cosy Italian-cuisine restaurant, holding the reputation of serving the best seafood risotto in town. Going to an Italian restaurant in Seoul is already quite stupid; going there with an Italian who doesn’t eat cheese, is totally insane! None of us ordered the risotto, but both spaghettis were quite decent. Apart from the menu, which had remote resemblances to Italian, nothing in the restaurant reminded me of Italy. Not even Giuseppe, who embarrassed the waiter, the cooker and the owner - and changed their cosmology – by insisting in that there are Italians who don’t eat cheese… As I use to say, lessons are to be learned at the most unexpected locations…

Don't worry, be happy...

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, and then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says "OK, now what?"

According to the KLM in-flight magazine, this was voted “the world’s funniest joke” in a website created for that effect by a University teacher. The whole January issue is dedicated to happiness, and it includes several articles and hints on how to be happy: songs to listen to, quotes to help in the way, films to watch, things to buy. I found out, for instance, that, according to the World Database of Happiness, the hotter a country is, the less happy people are. Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Finland are the happiest, while Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova, Zimbabwe and Tanzania are said to be at the bottom of the happiness scale. Belgium is on the Top 20; Portugal on the middle-range. I also found out that most people experience a “happiness dip” between the ages of 30 to 50, and that those 20 years generally are not considered the happiest in a person’s life. And, just to give some examples, I also learned that “part of being happy is simply a question of character”.

Being a Portuguese, 33-years-old, quite introvert person, I was starting to think that I was condemned to be unhappy… and I was about to close and throw out the magazine, just when I read some of the quotes on page 33. Leo Tolstoy is supposed to have said “If you want to be happy, be.” It was kind of relieving, but, since he was Russian and this country is quite close to the bottom of the scale, I was not completely sure that I could trust his expertise on the matter… The salvation came, as it often happens when it comes to quotes, from Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, just keep going”.

I smiled. Assuming that I won’t change citizenship any soon, I need to keep going through hell for 17 years more, only. The good news is that I plan to do it smiling. And the truth is that seamless, enjoyable travel experiences, like the one I am having in Korea, help a lot!

The big lack of sleep

I’m lucky that I get to make a living as a youth worker. I don’t work with heavy machinery and there’s little chance I’ll be burned by molten iron. And yet, I’m always tired… I feel like I’m constantly on call: if it’s not work, then it’s Facebook; if it’s not travelling, then it’s TV series. Somebody in my friends’ list is constantly giving a party or challenging me to go out. I’m kept awake late at night, and then I often wake up before the alarm clock is set to go off, thinking… worrying… stressing… Therefore, I find it a bit of a torture to know that, here, at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Berlin, they have a “sleeping beauty weekend program” which includes massages, sauna, baths and, I presume, time to sleep; a lunch at the Chef’s Table in the kitchen of the Michelin-honoured restaurant Vitrum; premium tickets and limousine transfer to a performance of the Staatsballett Berlin, including VIP reception and guided backstage tour; and a after-show dinner at the Brasserie Desbrosses restaurant… Finding this out, got me even more wired than before! Tired, yet too jealous to sleep!

Life is what happens when you stop counting time

Reaffirming the value of time, spending it freely, and having more of it… More time to connect. More time to wind down. More time to cherish the people and the places that intrigue us…

For me and many of the people who surround me – and, I believe, for most people -, time is probably the most scarce of the resources we possess. And, yet, time is there for everyone and it doesn’t cost anything at all… So, what have we done wrong, what do we keep doing wrong, that led and keep leading us to this almost ridiculous paradox? I don’t really know… I mean, wouldn’t it be logical that we put all our efforts in making sure that we, and the ones who surround us, fully enjoy the time we have? I think so… Then again, we all have good excuses not to do it, and we give up and accept with resignation the ideas that time flies, that we didn’t have enough time, that we were busy with other things…

Saint Augustine said that “the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page”. If there’s something I can’t complain about is the amount of pages I have been given to read throughout my life! I’ve travelled to almost 300 cities in more than 50 countries, and I keep doing it almost every week. Last week I was in the vibrant Madrid and in the small and discrete Recklinghausen; today I flew to the exceptional European metropolis and German capital of Berlin; and on Saturday I will go back to South-East Asia and, for the first time, to Korea.

I might have problems in fully enjoying my time, but I have been privileged enough to be able to fill my life with the wonderful stories and joys of travel. From shopping in the souks of Istanbul, to the exclusive experience of the Jamaican beaches, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to see some of the very best places and to do some of the most amazing things around the world.

Albert Einstein claimed that “joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift”. I tend to agree! I’ve been dedicating a lot of time to look and comprehend, not only the nature, but also the peoples, the cultures, the arts and the ideas. The problem with this exercise is that the more you look and comprehend, the more you want to look and comprehend. And whenever you think that you already know everything, you realise that you don’t know anything yet. The same happens to travelling: once you have the impression that you already know a certain place, you find out that there’s still much to discover about it; this applies to a certain and precise local exactly in the same way it applies to the whole world. Or, as the Monty Python’s Michael Palin puts it, “once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life”.

Then, of course, there are many different ways of travelling: from the armchair traveller to the most sophisticated globetrotter, from the backpacker to the luxurious jetsetter. I don’t normally have the means to travel in what some people would call style. But, as Gore Vidal said, “style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn”. I’m not very good at not giving a damn, though… Therefore, when I’m extraordinarily lucky and stay at hotels like The Ritz-Carlton in Berlin, I realise the importance of fully enjoying my time!

Week One

Wow… One week goes so fast! Especially when you have a lot on your plate! I mean, this expression is a bit unfortunate, as, in fact, I decided to lose weight and therefore my plate hasn’t been too loaded lately… but these first days at the office were indeed busy!

I have to say that I’m not very happy to see that, already on the first week, I spent more than 10 hours per day there and, on the top of everything, I even brought work home twice… but, what can I do?! Work is there to be done, and someone has to do it, right? And, to be honest, I feel very happy to be back at work! It’s not like if I didn’t enjoy my holidays though; I enjoyed them a lot! But I also like my job and the crazy and nice people I work with! So, all in all, it is good to be back!

Now, apart from the “diet” – let’s call it like that – there was another fact that marked this first week… I finished watching the third season of “The 4400” and will now have to wait a couple of months for the new episodes… it’s going to be hard! The series gets better and better, and I’m starting to be convinced that it is even better than “Lost”! Speaking of which… I finally got hold of the episodes of its third season – thanks Renaldas! – and will now start watching it for good!

So, as you can see, my life this week was a mix of work and TV series, with very little food and no alcohol at all… I don’t know what it says about me, but I’m guessing that it’s not exactly super-cool… fortunately, my travels are starting soon and I will therefore be rescued from the time spent in front of the TV… actually, in a couple of hours, I will go to Madrid, where I will attend the Alliance of Civilisations’ Forum. I wonder how I will be able to keep my new, and hopefully temporary, dietary regime…

Olimpio

Only three weeks have gone by, but the calendar says it’s a different year! The last days at work in 2007 were busy, but the perspective of going back home for holidays provided the necessary motivation to cope with the last tasks. And then, suddenly, the day came snowy, the car got full and the road opened up for us. First stop was Niort and the second Burgos. Only on the third day the Portuguese border was crossed and the final destination was achieved. The temperature was high, the sun was shining over the blue sky and the tables were full of delicious food and wonderful wine, which always make the long family reunion’s meals even more pleasant. And then Francisco joined us and everything seemed even nicer! Christmas came and gone, I found out that I haven’t been a very good kid lately, we went for a wonderful lunch with a group of great friends and then, suddenly, when everything seemed to be quite OK, the bad news came… Olimpio had passed away… I am normally quite rational when forced to face death (and other human dramas), but I have to admit that this particular one hurt me more than I expected… maybe because it came as a surprise, maybe because it came at a time which is supposed to be happy, maybe because he was so young or maybe because he was the father of very small kids… but I guess it was mainly because I loved him very much and I didn’t tell it to him neither enough nor recently… and that’s something I cannot forgive myself for… and then, at the funeral, I met so many of these friends I love the same way and, again, I didn’t tell them I do… and therefore I want to say it now: I love you all folks! Even if I don’t say it often, I do love you all! And I never forget you, even if I don’t call you on your birthdays… And I will never forget how much I learned from each and every one of you, or how much I owe you all; no matter how far away I am and how many years I will stay this far away from you. This was the last lesson Olimpio gave me… and God knows how much I learned from him! About books, and about cinema, and about music, and about politics… but mainly about friendship and love and god and these kinds of important stuff… so, Olimpio, wherever you are, I just wanted to say “thank you”… I guess you’ll know what I mean!

2008

Happy New Year!!!