…buenos aires

reina and i wanted to go to a place where both of us hadn’t gone before. and although we first wanted to go to peru, this took a little too much time for the days we had left in brasil. so we took a plane to buenos aires and we had an amazing time. it is a very european old-fashioned city, reminding me a little of paris, with it’s grandeur on the one hand and it’s dirty places on the other.

4 days of dulce de lecce, empanadas, the malba museum, casa rosada and so much more.

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…beautiful Brasil

i met my reina, talking about the beauty of marketing and music, the art of love and literature and our fascination with culture and other countries.

it was meant to be, i think.

but we were in the netherlands. so she already met the cold, the dutch and the water in general. i took almost every opportunity to show her the things that make us dutch to everyone who is not dutch and to everyone who is dutch. and you know what they say: “if it ain’t dutch, it ain’t much!” (and it’s probably warmer, too)…

so after learning about my background, i wanted to learn about hers too… so after having gone to south-korea to lecture, i went to brasil, salvador de bahia, to be exact.

and what an amazing and rich culture. of course, this is one of the places in brasil with the most history, as the portuguese landed just south of it in 1500. so staying with the most amazing hosts, showing me all of the things as if i were a local, i learned so much… about reina and actually also about myself. it is far too much to tell everything, but the pictures tell most of it. but shortly, we checked out salvador of course, some of the beaches north of it, beginning of the linha verde, pelourinho, we went to the beautiful chapada diamantina with it’s beautiful nature, etc. etc.

also we went to buenos aires, but i’ll show that in the next post.

anyway, here are the pictures:

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…strange seoul

fortunately, the weekend in the middle of my lecturing period at the netherlands maritime university in gwangyang, south-korea, consisted of an extra day. i believe it was memorial day.

so i took the opportunity to go to seoul and just sniff around the city.

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the first thing i noticed after arriving was, apart from the fact that i of course could not read anything, the enormous amount of people. not strange for a metropolitan city, you say. but i have been to a lot less big cities where it didn’t seem as busy and crowded. and in the middle of that you find these parks that form an oasis of peace and quiet. this is where i saw the most beautiful temples. also here, i understood why the south-korean people are so persistent and hard-working and achieving. all of the temples in those parks have been burned to the ground by (mostly) the japanese numerous times. and every time they rebuilt everything again. impressive.

and as far as food was concerned, i have to be honest: i don’t consider south-korea to be one of the more influential culinary countries with it’s table-bbq’s and kimchee (in another post, i will tell you about it). so in seoul i was glad to be able to get something Continue Reading…

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