Monday, September 28, 2009

3 weeks into work

Updates:
Got people wondering that I'm missing? Well, sort of busy with work. Work life = no life. Plus Korean lessons. Here is my weekly outlook:


Work - 8am - 5pm.
Mon, Wed - Korean classes from 8pm - 10pm.
Thurs - Basketball with NEXON peeps, 7:30pm - 9:30pm.
So I don't think I'll be on MSN on those nights. And this current arrangement sucks because work ends at 5pm and I have to wait. Too lazy to walk 20mins home and 20 mins back, so I just stay at office.


Weekends I spend touring Seoul, which is pretty much just a city, so I'm looking forward to going to the countryside, or skiing during winter. Work sucks because I can't communicate with those Koreans, and so they don't speak to me... I'm like an alien to them. As Vincent says, I (we) learn something new. We learn to stay quiet for 8 hours per day. zzz. How much I wish this were Japan. Whoever thinks this is a walk in the park needs to reconsider all factors and angles. I look forward to visits from SG. pft. grrrrrr. I should stop thinking in this angle. Thinking about maybe and what ifs. What if I didn't take this job, and waited for JET 2010. grrr.


So I'm pretty motivated to better my Korean. At least I (we) can communicate with the Son-saeng-nim. (she speaks Japanese too) At least she bothers to talk to us. To as least do something worthwhile at work and learn something.  Feel like a liability now. zzz. Maybe I should just slack two years. Or am I expecting too much from myself. (or the company?) Grrrr. The best thing is the weekends... I look forward to touring the country. Pft.


Address:
S. Korea, Seoul 943-24, Kangnam-ku, Daechi-dong, Shinan Metrokhan Officetel, #20-01


Handphone:
010-6422-1908, or
(+82)10-6422-1908

Home VOIP Telephone:
070-8129-7846, or
(+82)70-8129-7846

Thursday, September 17, 2009

the Korean language

well, Korean is Korean in Korea, just like Japanese is Japanese in Japan. hmmm... its difficult to explain, but as a Singaporean, I guess we have a different 'interpretation' towards language. English is the main (written) language in Singapore - if you only speak Mandarin (and no English), you can get by with a limited subset of Singapore. Likewise if you only speak Malay, or Indian, Japanese, Korean, assuming that you do not want to communicate with a person from another race.

I should have expected it, but then reading (and understanding) is different from experiencing. It always has been for me. Korean is the language here, it is the alphabet here. People type Korean on their keyboards as fast as I type English, perhaps 140wpm, it is quite amazing to see vowels and consonants combine to form words after words.

In my own internalized interpretation, Korean language is a "pronouncing-alphabet". Just like I can recognize abc...xyz immediately, Koreans can recognize 어디에 갈가요 as individual "unique-sounds" immediately. To me, I take time to _parse_ the characters, dissemble them, construct, and pronounce each sound.

e.g. 갈. It is made up of k-a-l. And so a string of (normally) 2~3 words form a meaning. Sometimes romanized, like 텔레비전. Other times from Chinese, like 약속.

Anyway, what am I driving at? Haiz... the language barrier is still too great for me to break. Nowadays I hardly speak 10 sentences a day, and I pretend I'm an invisible wall 95% of the time our team of 4~6 goes for lunch. Then the weekends are so empty and free. Its not like Japan anymore... not like I can go everywhere to explore and play. Sometimes my team helps me to order food for lunch. (T.T)

I need to start from zero... I need to forget my old self... I need to step out... I need to find a routine to settle down... in this new life~

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Home, work (NEXON) and basketball

OK I got my internet/cable-tv/VOIP phone. The cable guy came over on the 9th and he installed. Luckily he could speak Japanese (because he stayed there for a year) and so we conversed in Japanese.

Anyway here is my address (Sep-Nov 2009):

S. Korea, Seoul 943-24, Kangnam-ku, Daechi-dong, Shinan Metrokhan Officetel, #20-01

VOIP Telephone:
070-8129-7846, or
(+82)70-8129-7846
from Singapore. VOIP meaning its internet so its cheap for me, and then it might be turned off when I'm not at home.

Vincent is going to be attached to NEOPLE (a subsidiary of NEXON group), and I'm going to NEXON, devcat studio. I just signed a confidential form, so I can only say I'm working on a game similar to mabinogi, which is released in NA, EU, KR, JP, CH. (http://mabinogi.nexon.net/) My mentor is Jaesuk Gim, who can speak very little English. Vincent's mentor is James, studied in Canada. dammit.

My work is supposedly from 8am - 5pm. I will see whether I get any OT... (T-T)

We have Korean evening language classes after work Tues/Thurs, and then alternate with Tues/Fri. So that means every Tues with alternating Thurs-Fri, Thurs-Fri. Looks like we are going to be busy.

Then on our fortnightly free Thurs, we have basketball sessions. LOL. We were kinda automatically signed up for bball given that Vincent is 1.98m (I have heard qns about his height 20x times since day 1)... not that I mind, I'd like to meet as many colleagues as possible.

NEXON team plays full-court 5v5 against some "BBS" players who outnumber us 2:1. So we are pretty shacked. Anyway they are all quite tall... dammit I seem to be the weakest. The basketball guys were quite colorful, especially the few that had dinner with us.

Y.K. (An?), HR.
Park Star, web design.
Ogre, Talesweaver, Korea #1 hacker + hiphop rapper + composer + middle-school shotput champ.
Jason, Counterstrike Online #1 champion.

Ogre is like wy resized to 1.88m height, 120kg, gold earrings on one ear, negro hiphop style, transition-sports-glasses and when we went for dinner, he was like:
ogre: "Do you like kimchi?"
me: "Erm.... not bad. We ate it everyday... so we were kinda sick of it."
ogre: "You mean you fucking hate kimchi."
me: "Erm... ooh. Erm... yeah."
vincent: "(whisper) ...I like his style... he's cool."

LOL. He eats 4 burgers, 4 cokes for a meal, and wears cargo pants and jackets with 20 pockets so he can store sandwiches, burgers and coke cans. He is a walking vending machine. I likes.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Day 4

current status:

language problems sibei jialat till these two years going to be damn lonely. taking long time to setup everything... 10 days for alien foreign card... which w/o it i can't apply mobile/internet... so my status now is equivalent to illegal immigrant.

starting work this thurs 10 sept, because quarantine for 1 week for H1N1 even though i don't have symptoms. going to be working at Nexon Corp, mabinogi team.

current address (sept-nov 2009) is:
S. Korea, Seoul 943-24, Kangnam-ku, Daechi-dong, Shinan Metrokhan Officetel, #20-01

Saturday, September 5, 2009

first three days

first three days of settling in...
it feels totally like SEP so far... just exploring the places, getting the basic stuff like water, detergent, toiletries, food, toilet paper, bank account...

so far 0.5 day to setup bank account, 1 day of touring... not much completed. though thanks to Kate (and our project team heads), i got two programming (methodology?) books to read, and be tested for/submit a summary, within a week. Which is also due to H1N1 (they call it SI - swine influenza here), that I need to be quarantined.

well, good news in a sort of way, otherwise i would have had to start work immediately. One maplestory children picture book for myself, because i seriously need to resume studying korean. this place is totally like Japan, and everything is the same as before, except I don't f**king understand korean. I can't even get the TV up and running by myself. shit. I need to get motivated, and i need to trick myself to study.

And all this is before i start work... before i get to meet all the colleagues and talk to them in Korean. Which is impossible for me, at the state of only being able to say yes/no/goodbye/thank you/sorry. And I heard my mentor is starting to learn English for me. Haha it will be a quackquack-cockadoo situation very soon. f**k. At least Vincent's mentor went to California to learn English before. dammit.

And there's a relationship issue that I'm keeping somewhere at the back of my mind, which Vincent terms "an open relationship". Which I don't know how to handle... Logically and plainly speaking, what she needs right now in her stage of life is someone to study with her, play with her... enjoy her uni life. Which i can't really do...   I need to polish my survival skills - to be able to eat, sleep, interact, commute, communication, work happily in office/home, and make as much friends as possible - which any person who went on exchange knows how important this is.

I need to step out of myself right now, to put on full power to my sluttiness and lameness and joker and craziness (which I have pretty much confidence in) - the life that I choose to lead... the crazy, full-throttle, ever-changing life. How can I make her happy, how can I make everyone happy? I don't know the answer...

uverworld~ D-tecnolife
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKD-lh68g4


癒えない 痛み 悲しみで キズついた 君
もう笑えないなんて 人嫌いなんて 言葉そう言わないで
見えない未来に起こる事 全てに意味があるから
今はそのままでいい きっと気付ける 時が来るだろう

How can I see the meaning of life...