Wally Nes’ Blog

Hello everyone.

So I’ve been busy n’ stuff. Not much interesting blogposts result from being busy n’ stuff.

I came here in the heart of winter and one of the first things I got to experience was a once in a 15 year occurrence. Ausenalstereisvergnugen. It doesn’t often get cold enough here for the ausenalster to freeze enough to carry the entire population of Hamburg, but 2012 was one such a year. It was kind of cool although I didn’t have my skates there to scare the bejezus out of innocent people.

Since then I’ve kept myself busy looking for a place to live and I may just have found one. I’m living there now, of course, but it remains to be seen if we’ll stay here for any length of time. The place does come with internet though (well, I had to have it installed of course) which is a vast improvement on my previous lodgings.

The thing about not having a home or internet is that I spent a lot of my weekends searching for one on the other. The other being provided free at Starbucks or a (very) select few cafés. And the thing about spending your weekends in a café with a laptop on your lap is that you don’t end up doing as many exciting things as one might.

There were a few things I noticed while I’ve been here:

• God, people are pale here. And blonde, my bog people are white and blond here.
• Germans drink beer. A lot of beer. And everywhere. Been on public transport is very normal, in weekends almost the norm. And this isn’t even Bavaria, where I’ve been told it is worse. With Airbus being a company located in a country where drinking beer (Germany) or wine (France) at lunch  (Not to sure about Spanish lunch customs) is customary and Airbus being a company where operating heavy machinery after lunch is also sometimes a thing this creates a nice situation. It’s banned btw, none of your aerial transports have been put together while drunk.
• Fried potatoes come with bacon. Always.
• It’s so nice living in a country with decent bread and beer readily available.
• Punk is not dead, though it is getting very hard to take it seriously.
• People are still short. Taller than Koreans, but still short.

Now there’s another thing that’s been keeping me from experiencing exciting things I could write down and claim as my own interesting story.
People keep getting married.
Takes up a lot of time, you know. Visiting those weddings. Very nice though, both of them and I look forward to the 3rd one in two weeks. But those are not my stories to tell.

And now, it is spring in Hamburg. So in one blogpost ice and flowers.

The problem with the Germans is that they’re just not different enough compared to my arbitrarily chosen version of normal. So not much they do strike me as weird and as a result this blog suffers.
I’ll be sure to head to South America soon.

Wally

Greetings all,

It has been a while since I last wrote, but I have a good excuse. I promise.

I’ve moved across the world, almost back to where I started. The start to Japan, Korean, America, Australia or a variety of other destinations.
I am not back in the Netherlands, though I was for 2 days. I’ve moved to Hamburg. I started working for Airbus 4 days ago and they required me to physically be here. So I’ve been busy moving here.

When I heard I was moving here I was excited of course, looked Hamburg up on the internet and started to educate myself. One thing that stood out was the it was 13 degrees here. Quite the difference from the -10 conditions of Seoul, South Korea. Everyone that feels jealous of this, let me put your mind at ease: It was below zero when I arrived and it hasn’t gotten any warmer since then. Snow too. At least I have a river I frequent which is quite pretty this way.

I’ve moved to the section of Hamburg that Airbus is also located at, which means I’m south of the River. Apparently, all the cool kids live north of the river. I can deal with that as I’ve only booked a month at my gasthaus. What I’m having a harder time with are the things the gasthaus doesn’t offer. This includes a washing machine, a freezer and THE INTERNET. This would be manageable if these things were offered in close proximity. This morning I took a 30 minute bus-ride to get access to the  first two. In a country where “having over 20 ms latency is a National disaster” –Some German; I can’t find free wifi in my entire city section. What backward hell is this? I do think I’ve found a laundrette closer to home though, but the combination I used this morning of laundry and café with wifi this morning was kind of nice.

Now, as mentioned I started my work with Airbus this week and I’d tell you about it, but . . .
I signed some kind of non-disclosure agreement, and it was in German. So I haven’t been able to figure out what I can tell you.
What should be OK is the rough location of my office building. Mine is next to the airstrip on site. This means I hear planes take off every hour or so. This includes first flights and stuff. If you’re not an airplane enthusiast this probably sounds like a nuisance, but for those of you that are . . . . well, lets just say that the majority of my colleagues still scoot to the window every hour or so, regardless of how long they’ve worked there.
Also: Stress Engineer on Vertical Tail Planes/Vertical Stabilizer. Something something project management something something composite engineer something something Long range. I’ve yet to get a precise title of what role I fill but there is lots of room for variety in the department apparently.

Anyway, I am currently benefiting from the free wifi at Starbucks for international communication and to help look for a permanent place to stay. I will take recommendations on city districts and affordable rooms if you have them. But for now, my cup is empty and I will stop being such a leech and get on with my first weekend in my new town.

A quick update regarding our goings-on this month. Last you heard of me I reported on the Christmas market marking the true celebration of St Nicholas (non of this fat-jesus-with-a-beard nonsense). Since then I attended Raphaëlle’s Messiah concert, been sick and gotten a job.

Also, we became those people.

Putting our pet in the Christmas card . . . how low we’ve sunk.

I worked during the concert.  Manning the door during, but a host of other logistic things beforehand. As such I got to see and hear the concert over the video/sound system of the church. As such I only got to take 1 picture. I hope I can add some to the album when I manage to get a hold of other peoples’ photographs.

There was a professional recording at the church and the first CDs have been released. I’m sending some to a couple of people, but if you’re interested in a copy, let me know.

Then there was Christmas dinner. It involved a pumpkin (Oh wait, was that supposed to be for Thanksgiving?)

A pumpkin filled with cheese (who would do such a thing) baked to a fondue style.

Luckily there was also a persimmon pudding.

Which, topped with crème Anglaise, is fabulous.

After that there was coughing, drugs, beds and hot drinks.

And I’d like to end this blog post (because we are those people) with this.

Orion’s dog crate. In which we will transport him somewhere one day.

Although I should say “European Christmas Market” I suppose.

There was, over this weekend, a “European Christmas Market”. Now, I’ve been to these before and they’re quite fun. You may imagine this:

or

Important to realize though, that this is Korea. There is a christmas market here, it’s just not quite that scale.

What we had instead was this.

Raclette

Dutch stand

8 little stalls, passing off Chili con carne as European (or Christmassy for that matter) and the Dutch saying “Fuck you, we’re doing Sinterklaas instead”.

So, here’s from me. Fijn Sinterklaas gewenst.

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Completely unrelated by everything other than it happening on the same date was the Camarata Music Company’s Chamber Singers’ Christmas concert, or CMCCSCC (That’s a lot of capitalization).

Notable songs include the English version of Shchedryk, one of my favourite Choral numbers. I enjoyed my first exposure to the English version though I think someone should have pushed the lyricist for something more varied.

The start of the concert was good. Toward the end though . . . look at those noobs, you can’t get good volume looking down at your sheets like that, blocking off your windpipe. Almost better off having the audiance participate.

More pictures can be found here.

There’s a Lantern Festival in Seoul now.

It’s kind of neat.

Shouldn’t have gone on a Saturday though.

Kind of busy.
The festival was along Cheonggyecheon. For those of us that live here and are familiar with the place, there was a 1 hour queue to get down next to the water and get close up views of what I merely took pictures off from up above.

More Pictures here.

The last post was primarily pictures.  And while a picture can say more than 1000 words (or more than that if you believe these guys).

So I want to provide you with some of the things that happened off camera and that can’t really be said with a picture.

Like: “Oh dear LORD, not more fish head stew”
Although . . . .


That was the first fish head stew and those were pictures.
You see, after a year-and-a-half in Korea I still don’t understand most of what is written on the walls of Korean diners. Most of it just doesn’t show up in my little dictionary.

So there was this dish which, on the next table, looked exactly like tofu and noodle stew.
The tofu was tofu, the noodles were fish brain. Hoorah.
Underneath the tofu and fish brain was an assortment of different organ meat aaaaaaaaaaaand fish heads.

What you see on the side there are different Kimchi side-dishes. You may have heard me bitch about kimchi. Kimchi comes in many different varieties wrt season and the like. I like some of them, but the poster child of kimchi is the napa cabbage Kimchi. After 3 days of getting this with every meal my parents were able to accede that it does indeed suck balls.

The problem with this conclusion was that it came too soon. You see, they reached this conclusion while still in Seoul. In Seoul, non-Korean eateries are quite numerous and one can get away from kimchi if one so desires.

We subsequently left Seoul!

Can you guess where this is going?

I was asked to lead my parents to small villages to get away from the Korean Big city™, meanign generic Korean cities which all kind of look the same anyway. Consequently, we ended up here.

I’ll give you a guess what our options were regarding breakfast.
It involved fish guts. Well, it would likely have been fish guts. It’s not like we checked the 8 seafood restaurants if they offered croissants.

Due to that and the only source of coffee being a vending machine we left for the Gyeongju, referred to as museum without walls here, before 8 in the morning and didn’t stop till we found a place that offered coffee and some things Koreans consider rolls.