Gangneung: Reminiscenses Of Lund

It's been a bit more than a month since I moved to Korea.

I did visit it before, so I already got some ideas about the place, but living here has showed me a bit more of the life here.

And it heavily reminds me of Sweden....or to be fair and more precise, of my particular experiences while in Lund, Sweden.

First of all, most apartments have wooden floors and floor-based heating. This is a small but important detail. Because of this, most apartments also have an entry area where you leave your shoes and jackets. This is rather common in winter areas, but this in Korea is very very similar to the same thing in Sweden, with different tiles and height, to really delimitate that you should not step on the wooden floors with the street shoes. The apartments's style is also familiar, with thick walls and windows, quality details and big living room/kitchen areas, and then one room or more apart, a distribution based on big spaces more than in compartmentalising the floor.

Then of course there's the weather, which is not as cold as north Sweden by far, but it is similar to the weather in the part of Sweden where I lived (although Gangneung is colder than Lund), more temperate but still pretty cold, where it snows during winter. By the way, it snowed already a couple of times, and it was cold enough that it accumulated and lasted for 2-3 days each time, plus in the mornings there were ice layers everywhere. This of course poses problems, especially because I move around with a bike, and I need to be careful about this ice....

Moving around with the bike is also a nice reminder. It's not like I don't move around with a bike in Barcelona, but here in Gangneung the town is small enough to allow using it almost everywhere, while streets and roads are, if not prepared, at least open to the fact that people use bikes around. Adler was also small enough to use a bike, but the reality was that the culture there was unused to this so nobody did it...It is true that Gangneung has way too many cars, and cars are the transport of choice of most people, there's not a lot of bikes going around....but there's some. And again, this is from my point of view, and both here and in Sweden I had similar experiences while using a bike (like going towards some party in a bike, going shopping in a bike, crossing snow with a bike, using a bike while slightly drunk, etc.), in part I guess because it's the two places I've been where it's easy to have your own bike, and it's not stressful.

This brings me to the security thing...I can leave the bike unlocked in the street or just with a locked wheel and I know no one is going to steal it. I love this feeling of security, not even Barcelona has this....here I know I can have my bike to move around and I will probably be fine, and it's not a source of worry. The same applies for using mobiles on the street or having money in the wallet. After Rio, this is incredible and allows me to be a lot more relaxed and calm at any moment.

Internet is also pretty similar, with rather good speeds, although I believe the intercontinental connections and the state censorship that is applied on websites slows traffic down considerably depending on what you're trying to access....

Finally, there's also the social atmosphere. One thing in Korea that is pretty awesome is that all English teachers need to be natives, so from an English-speaking country. This, plus the Olympic travellers, means there's a big group of people from all around the world, even in such a small town. So it feels you're meeting people from lots of places, and because of that there's also a "party" atmosphere, in a way.....I really like this atmosphere, and in other projects there was also a certain feeling like this, but it was usually Olympic-related while here it's more open (well, in the sense that there's also this other group, the English teachers). There's even people who will be happy to meet to play board and card games...

Of course, there's also things that are not similar at all (starting from the population, not many tall and big, blonde, blue-eyed people in the streets here...)

For example, the culture here seems a lot more closed to foreigners and changes, and there are social issues that are light-years behind in Korea compared to Spain (and let's not compare it with Sweden which is more advanced that Spain in plenty of those...). There's a big cult for looks in here, and women are still treated really bad in general...also, work follows a very capitalist model, where you cannot get sick and stay at home to rest (which is worse for the company as well because you're less productive at work and you can get other people sick). SIM cards and phone numbers are ridiculous hard to get. The food is evidently completely different, usually spicy even when they say it's not, or very sweet. There's plenty of dishes with lots of green vegetables, mushrooms and leaves(and rice, of course), and meat is common in dishes but not in big quantities outside barbecue places (and in supermarkets it's expensive). And as I already mentioned, traffic is very car-based, even for small trips that with a bike would be 10 minutes or less, and driving is rather aggressive and chaotic (but well, I was in Russia and Brazil, nothing new or worse than that, really) , with plenty of intersections that are rather badly-designed and cause waits for everyone involved. One surprise I got was that, in general, cars do not respect pedestrians, but they do watch out for them, it's just they don't give way to pedestrians unless they're about to hit them or so...

So yeah, plenty of differences actually, and more I have not mentioned...


Still, the atmosphere has a certain similarity for sure... 

Meaningless Fun

I just realised I never wrote a really long post about Overwatch....

Overwatch is a relatively-new game from Blizzard, an online multiplayer shooter with no in-game plot. You have 2 teams competing against each other in different modes of play, but usually it's 6 versus 6, and based on controlling some area (fixed or mobile if it's represented by a vehicle), and in most modes there's an attacking team and a defending team. You have a number of characters to choose from (at the moment it's 23 but it may increase every few months), each one with a very particular playstyle, but dividen broadly between attack, defence, tanks and support. Depending on the mode you can repeat characters on your team or not (but it's moving towards not repeating caracteres outside "fun" modes). The matches are short (10-15 minutes max, usually, can be much shorter), and it's fast paced and a bit chaotic.

Since it's a Blizzard game, there's a big and rich story around it, with a science-fiction world where self-conscious AIs have appeared and technological advances are miraculous, but where there is still war and factions. In this setting we have our "heroes" (or villains), most of them belonging to "Overwatch", a type of "world police" or military that especially helped in a war against AIs. That's the general setting. Then, each character has a personal story and motivation, with complex interactions and still plenty of things we do not know about them, this world and the secret societies and factions. Blizzard has released several movies and webcomics about all this, with really high quality.

The thing is, this is not shown at all during game-play. During game-play, it's just a 6 vs 6 mayhem bullet/explosion fest, where enemies play together in the same team without hesitation, and where objectives are very bland and unoriginal, and stakes seem pretty low.

While the story is pretty awesome, when the game is defined like this it seems rather boring. The thing is, it's not. At all. It is really really fun to play as one of these characters. Matches are a exciting and dramatic and fast, while being a bit cartoonish to lower tension (when you die, your characters makes some funny comment afterwards like "hope no one saw that" and such). Each character is very unique, and it's quite a different experience to play one or the other.

To elaborate a bit, attackers are usually fast-moving and/or quite deadly in a close space, and have abilities that usually deal plenty of damage. Defenders are more specialised, and their skillset is usually good to clear areas from a static point (snipers, turrets). Sometimes the lines between both are a bit blurry, since you can have defenders with very high damage output or attackers that are better at a distance.

Tanks are more straightforward, they are big, have a lot of health and have skills to either create shields or recover the health fast. The idea here is to attract fire while not dying, but they can also be pretty deadly if left unchecked.  Finally support characters are mostly healers or providers of bonuses/perks, and sadly they're a bit underutilised, although they can also be really interesting and rewarding.

Personally my 2 favourite characters to play are Junkrat and Mercy. Junkrat is a defender with a hilariously high damage output, and I love his playstyle of littering everything with grenades and explosives. The chaos that ensues is usually quite fun, even if sometimes you don't really know if a grenade will hit the enemy or bounce back and hit you, but any direct hit you score is going to cripple the opponent  considerably, and even if you die you drop some extra grenades that may finish your rival as well. Mercy is the healer per definition, the only character able to revive others and with the higher healing output. Playing Mercy feels a bit like you're the team's "Mom", making sure everyone is healthy and fine, and jumping around the battlefield. Also, killing someone with Mercy is a bit of a waste (because you're more useful focusing on healing or powering up other people), but it's really rewarding. The only problem is that, as the local healer, the other team will make you a priority target, so if your team ignores you you will die a lot and you always feel you have a big bulls-eye in your head....

I would recommend Overwatch without a doubt, if you enjoy shooters. However, I insist on the fact that the game itself has no plot...

I have said it before, but I love plots. I love fiction in all its variants and enjoy a good setting and a well-thought world. When playing games I think the same, and sometimes I enjoy games that may not have the best mechanics but their story is great. For example, recently I started playing Pillars Of Eternity. This is an Obsidian game, similar to Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights, but with a system not based on D&D, they created their own. This is a pure Role-Playing game, story-heavy and full of nice little details.

For example, one thing I really love in Pillars of Eternity is that sometimes actions that cannot be done with the current game engine (like, for example, climbing down a hole, pulling a party member from a precipice, launching a weapon so someone else can use it, etc..) are instead narrated next to beautiful illustrations, with you choosing from some available options and using your game stats (like your knowledge or your strength and reflexes) to decide the outcome. I find this really immersive and amazing, a way to involve you in an "action" scene that would be fully scripted otherwise and in this way you can affect and participate in it. This opens a world of possibilities, and allows interactive storytelling while maintaining a different core game and not having to develop costly or even impossible game mechanics to represent this during the normal play.

Another thing that is really immersive and nice is that there's no alignment, you have reputation and your actions and choices guides you towards a certain type of RPG personality, something more greyish and not so black and white as most computer RPGs have.

I also heavily recommend Pillars Of Eternity, it is gorgeous and interesting and compelling. Having said that, it's like a complete opposite of Overwatch,

In Pillars of Eternity, you feel you have advanced and achieved something new if you play for a while. Overwatch, instead, is just mindless fun, and you can "waste" hours in it without really anything to show or gain (apart from an arbitrary level that you keep progressing).  However, Overwatch is so well-designed that it can get away with no plot and be just fun, which is something to respect too of course....

Nevertheless, I would like a bit more correspondence between story and gameplay. Overwatch has defined in it's backstory at least 2 clear factions, so I think it would be eventually possible to divide characters in 2 groups at least, and in this way have a more asymmetric competition while keeping things interesting and establishing a better relationship with the plot part...

Of course, this would require a lot more characters, to make sure both groups get enough of all types. However, Blizzard has time to develop that...

The Art Of (Mis)interpreting Polls

It's been a while since I commented on Spanish politics, because Spanish politics are still really really shitty and it just gets me mad. There were 2 general elections in a row (first one didn't work out so well) and, big surprise, the usual parties won. The most corrupt party actually improved their results a lot. The almost as corrupt party lost support but still had more than enough to be relevant, and at least the new corrupt party didn't win as much as the polls said. Anyway, these 3 parties never had any intentions to associate themselves with the new left party (which may not be perfect but it has some good ideas and could improve the situation), because they would have to stop with the corruption and such things, and in a predictable move they kind of allied with each other. The only good part is that the most corrupt party is ruling in minority, so the almost as corrupt party and the new corrupt party are happy with destroying some of the damage the most corrupt party had done by undoing their previous laws and pretending to be very different in this way, and that's at least a bit decent.

Anyway, Spain is ruled by corrupts and far-right patriots and traditionalist, and I've abandoned all hope of this changing in the next 50 years. The next hope is to just separate from that.

So these days there has been an interesting poll about what Catalans think about the independence process and, more particularly, about doing a referendum, plus also which parties would they vote in a theoretical new local election.

This poll was done by a newspaper with a center-left bias, but big supporter of the almost as corrupt party. This party is against voting to see what Catalan people want to do regarding independence, so the newspaper had to give results that reflected that this vote was a problem for Catalunya.

Here the thing is that the poll said otherwise, so the newspaper had to present it in a bad way to try to reinforce their ideas that voting to decide Catalunya's future was bad and divisive.

So, they wrote that "The Referendum splits the Catalan people", saying that around 49% of the people were in favour of doing a referendum unilaterally without consulting Spain, and 48% were against this idea.

Of course, if you say it like this, it seems it's a 50-50 matter. But they had to publish all the results after all, and as some other have pointed (link in Catalan, sorry), the reality is that a staggering  84.6% of the Catalans DO want to vote. It's only that of those 84.6%, there's almost a half that want to vote in a Referendum negotiated with the Spanish government, and are against doing it without consulting Spain.

If you put it like this, it is quite clear what is the will of the people, that are pretty much united in their intention to vote. However, all the corrupt Spanish parties do not understand the "democracy" concept and are against letting the vote happen. They're paralysed in their fear of the "Yes" winning, and instead of negotiating, campaigning for "No" or proposing a better relation between Catalunya and the Spanish government, they close their ears and hope that by making voting illegal (yep, that's right) they can solve the issue. Meanwhile, they keep rescuing private companies with public money, and they keep neglecting inversions in Catalunya, and they keep trying to judge and condemn politicians for trying to discuss and debate the independence topic.

So every day, people are more and more tired of this, and independence gains supporters.

Other results that the newspaper "forgot" to reinforce as quite brutal and tried to diminish their importance or applied make up to them:

-When voting for independence, the "Yes" would win with 54.8% and "No" would get 45.2%.

-The first poll indicated what people preferred, but if there was an unilateral Referendum, 68% of the people would vote anyway, regardless of their previous wish. If you then count what people would vote in this case, "Yes" wins by more than 80%.

-More than half of the people that support parties that are against voting would be in favour of voting anyway.

-56% of Catalan people believe Spain is not a democratic country because they're not allowed to vote on a Referendum.


Now, on the second part of the polls, people were also asked what party would they vote right now in case of elections. The results were that, out of a total of 135 representatives, between 88 and 94 would be from parties considered left or centre, with right parties being relegated to very small numbers . If you count parties in favour of the Referendum, you would get between 84 and 89.

Polls are not exact and who knows for sure what will happen. But it seems to me Catalunya has a chance of something...different. Really different from conservative Spain.

And some people are scared shitless about it...

Difficulty In Gameplay

I've been reading a discussion lately about Dark Souls' difficulty where it was argued that every game should have difficulty settings and be made as accessible as possible.

This is an interesting discussion, and I felt like writing a bit about it.

For starters, some people argued that an easy mode would diminish the sense of accomplishment of the people that finish the normal Dark Souls or other hard games. This is idiotic and misses the point. If you really really like difficult games, playing them and finishing them is its own accomplishment. For example, people have played the legendary mode in Halo while having always the easy option as well, and it didn't make them feel that the Legendary mode was diminished by having also the easy option. If anything, playing the hardest setting gives you certain "bragging rights", which is not the nicest thing to do but it does feel nice to know you have a certain level of skill.

If that would be the only argument against difficulty there would be no discussion. What is interesting is the people that mentioned that difficulty was part of the game atmosphere and it was integral to understand the world of the game and the developer's artistic message.

This is trickier. When you start talking about art, anything goes. That's the thing about art, if the artist says you should experience it in a certain way because it's the only way to trigger the required emotions , it's hard to argue that you should not...regardless of the fact that the artist may be an asshole about it.

Sometimes it has been discussed if games are art. Well, yes, they are, end of the discussion. Of course plenty of them are bad examples,  same way plenty of art is terrible (there's lots of terrible movies,terrible books and poems, terrible music, terrible paintings, etc),but the badness of some of them does not diminish the goodness of others, it just makes them brighter.

Therefore, as artistic expression, some games may be difficult on purpose to recreate certain emotions on the player. And it's a valid point. I have not seen "funny games", but I know its purpose is to make you, the movie viewer, feel bad about torture porn movies, in a way. Same can be said about some games, like "I wanna be the guy", which tries to frustrate the player in ironic and terrible ways. The frustration it generates is a wanted side effect, the game wants you to kind of laugh at the twisted ways it's killing you or tricking you into traps. That also enhances the feeling of accomplishment once you pass certain sections.

Another point that I would like to make is that horror games,to be truly horror games, need to be difficult. Otherwise they're action games set up inside a horror story, which is very different.  Horror games should bring dread by playing. If the story is scary but playing is not, I would say they have not truly done their intended purpose. And the only way I know to make the player scared is by making the player vulnerable,and to punish failure. This needs to be balanced, of course, too many deaths and it becomes just frustrating, but the right amount makes you feel truly immersed in the game and really scared.

Dark Souls is not exactly horror but the difficulty is basic for its premise of a decaying ruthless world. You need to experience feeling little and weak, lost, in such a world. You need to feel that only hard work and good fighting skills will get you through. The setting is really important, and this difficulty is basic to achieve that.

Having said that, games are never equal for everybody. What one person finds difficult is easy for another. So, if you, as a game designer, want players to experience a certain degree of difficulty,  it is basic to put different levels. This is kind of like clothes, you cannot tailor-made it for each player but you can make scales of difficulty. You can even put recommendations, I have seen already this in current games, where they point that if you're familiar and comfortable with a certain gameplay you should choose this or that difficulty.

Of course some may argue that not all games allow you to tune  the difficulty in an easy way, and that it's not possible to make them easier without changing them completely. And this is true, but not in all games. For example, platformers do depend on the level design exclusively for its difficulty, so you cannot really graduate that. One map is as difficult as it is. You could theoretically increase or decrease it by changing things like jump distance,but its hard to argue if this would make it easier or harder.

However, in most current games the dependency on the map is greatly reduced. For example, in Dark Souls, increasing your HP and decreasing damage dealt by enemies is an easy and effective way to make the game easier, allowing for more mistakes. There's plenty of other stats that you could play around without changing level design nor other mechanics, enabling you to experience some of the traps in the game and such things while lowering the challenge to an acceptable level.

Then of course there is fake difficulty,  like not explaining basic mechanics (don't put a compulsory tutorial but leave a manual you can consult at will),or the inability to pause. This point in particular really annoys me, and may force me to never finish the game even if I kind of enjoy it. I think this adds nothing to the setting nor the tension,  and it's just a dick move.

However, not counting fake difficulty,  a difficult game can be required by the creator to produce the wanted emotions. The thing then is to consider what is the lowest difficulty level and what is the highest, and what levels are in between, knowing that the higher you put the starting bar and the less options are to change its height, the less people will jump over it.

In the end, therefore, while it is a valid demand from an artistic point of view to experience the game in a certain difficulty setting, it depends again on what audience the creator wants to have 

If you believe only a selected chosen few superhumans deserve to experience your art fully, you have every right to do so with your creation,  but this tends to mark you as a huge asshole...

We need stranger stories

I've been living in Gangneung for a bit over 2 weeks now. My apartment is furnished and I'm getting used to live here, and so far it's quite good^^.

Warning: Geeky post ahead, and spoilers for Halo 5.

When I came here, I brought with me a new xbox one that I bought. Since I'm alone, I thought I may have a chance to play a bit, and indeed I have played. Since games are expensive, I currently only have 2 games, one that came with the console and another one. I will bring some of my old xbox 360 games with me soon, and I will be able to play those as well, but for the moment it's quite enough.

The two games are Battlefield 1 (it came with the console) and Halo 5.

I've been a fan of Halo since I discovered it, and I made other posts about it. I think it's a game that combines fun gameplay with story and ambientation (music, scenery) that makes you want to continue playing and advance. It is impressive, epic, dramatic, and also fun. When Bungie stopped developing them it was a big drama, but after playing Halo 4, I saw that the new dedicated department that has the task of continuing with the games was dedicated and similar enough to continue with the original feeling and making an interesting plot.

Halo 4 had some confusing plot elements, but I continued to like it. So, I started Halo 5 with the expectation to be similarly good. And I was not disappointed, I'm enjoying it greatly. After such a long time without playing a Halo, it was like riding a bike or driving a car...all these gestures, movements, actions and possibilities that were new but familiar, that my reflexes learned again by just remembering them.  That was pretty awesome...and the music and atmosphere were still great, epic and strange, maintaining the sci-fi feeling some stories do not manage to achieve.. .


However, there were 2 tings that annoyed me a bit. First one was one new playable character, called Locke. The game changes perspective between him and Master Chief.

In a world full of bland space marines, this character manages to outbland most of them. He's not interesting, he's not dramatic, he does not transmit empathy nor makes me care for him at all. Master Chief, even being pretty bland, has a huge amount of very subtle registers, and a clear inner world that seems interesting. I did not detect any such thing in Locke. He's like your typical "I follow orders" type of military main character,

Also, you're playing in a team with another character voiced by Nathan Fillion, with his looks and part of his tone and characteristic humour. I would much rather play as him, really...no comparison whatsoever....his character is interesting. The one you play, not really.

The second thing is that in this game Cortana is labelled and acts as the bad guy (or girl, or AI). First of all, the most interesting thing in all Halos is Cortana, period. Other characters just do not reach her level at all. Her sarcasm, funny comments, usefulness, depth, etc....cannot really compare with the others. Second, her turning evil is just managing to get to immortality (she was created with an arbitrarily short expiration date) and trying to establish some system to stop people form killing each other constantly. In a world where 2 games ago several species where about to be wiped out because of conflict and war, that seems quite a sensible move, really. I don't see why this is supposed to be bad...Sure, there's the eternal discussion about dictatorships and liberties and all that....but, again, we're taking about a world setting where intergalactic wars are glassing planets and entire colonies get exterminated....and where the guys that are saying "this is bad, she cannot have this control" are the ones that are sent by their bosses and superiors to kill and conquer without much question...hell, the "main character" seems to be a guy that was sent in purely assassination missions ....I mean, the feeling I get is that if it was the human species achieving this power, the game would paint it positively (take Mass Effect's example).

This made me think that I'm a little tired about stories where the omniscient creature is labelled evil when they try to tell humans to stop killing each other or else...plenty of times we get situations where the humans are being forced to be pacific, and this is presented as reducing our liberties....I believe here there's heavy influence from USA's second amendment craziness and the fact that plenty of these stories are made by people in the USA or based in USA's movies and so on... in general, I have repeated this before, but we need to stop focusing on humans when telling sci-fi or fantasy stories....we tend to put the humans as the main characters, and this is the same as putting male bland military protagonists...I don't know at which point someone decided that male guys are the main market for all this fiction and they cannot relate to people unless they're also male and manly....and human, when we add fantasy to the plot...and we need to get rid of this preconceptions.

Stories need to be weirder, more open, more diverse, and take risks, take new stances and original paths. For example, whatever happens in Halo 6, I would love for Cortana to win, and to see that the new results was actually pretty nice. This would be a nice plot twist, something out of the norm, and something to remove humans from the protagonist and ruler point of a sci-fi story with so much more potential than what stupid military space marines offer...

Gangneung: First Contact

So, I’m in Gangneung now:


This is situated in South Korea. I’ll be here until this Friday, and then I’ll come back at the end of November.

South Korea is a very interesting place. After Brazil and Russia, I really wanted to try and live in a country more technologically and socially advanced, just to check the differences and enjoy the better level of live.  We lived very well in Russia, but Adler had plenty of issues. In Brazil, we lived adequately but the problems of the city and the country really affected us, and we managed fine but we would not want to live there for long periods again, we would go back just for tourism and in a while….so, South Korea sounded attractive. The only thing is that my son has started school and after considering this and other variables, we decided that this time I would go alone. This is not the best thing in the world, but just for a year and 3 months and with a total of 5 trips back while being there we thought it would be ok after all…

The trip itself was nothing special after having done plenty of other transoceanic flights, but it’s true that Turkish airlines is really good, nice food and nice movies to watch while flying^^.

The first contact I had with the country was of course in Incheon Airport (Seoul). On the passport control, after scanning mine with a machine, an automatic voice told me in Spanish to put my index fingers in two fingerprint readers. IN SPANISH. After that the check lasted 2 minutes, if that much. This is the first thing I loved.

The second thing I loved was free wifi without registering anywhere. Just connect to the open network and use it….after other airports, this was amazing. The third thing I loved was going to the airport shops and seeing signs about leaving the suitcases outside to not bother people…and people doing so, with suitcases in the corridors, unsupervised, while the owners could not see them. Do you know how that feels, especially after Brazil??

At this point I knew. Whatever happened later, and whatever problem I found in the country, culture or in the project, I was going to love this country….

Since Gangneung is actually pretty far from this airport, I went to the information post. I had been told there was a bus that went directly, so I asked about it. They told me its timetable, which exit to use to get there and what to do and wrote everything in Korean, so no problems there^^.

The bus was pretty awesome, its seats were huge, only 3 per row, soft and comfy. The only problem is that the trip was more than 4 hours…the last 2 felt very long, especially because we got a couple of traffic jams.

During the trip I looked around, but I got a bad day for sightseeing since everything was covered by a low cloud and it was raining. I could see it’s a very green country, but not like Brazil (which is green but clearly tropical, with really huge plants and trees), more like France or Germany, but with different vegetation. There was a surprising amount of agriculture going on, I could see plenty of people working in small fields under the rain, even if it was Sunday. And lots of lights and leds in the road indicating different things, I noticed that too, they seem to love leds and lights….

Gangneung is a coastal city after the mountains where the Winter Games will take place. The mountains themselves are rather low, 700-1000m, but I’m told it snows enough in winter to do snow activities in there. The feeling I got was like a big town or small city, with some main roads but afterwards plenty others with no sidewalk, areas with small houses and not much people or traffic. Unlike the airport, nothing was in English and people don’t really speak it apart from at the office and at the stations (and even then, at the office I’m really surprised by the fact that plenty of people working for Olympics do not speak English well enough to communicate without help, which is not ideal….), so I realized it would not be easy to live there without getting the basics of the language…but I had been warned about it, so it was ok.

The first days were very nice and interesting. The area is very calm,  as I said like a small town, with some particular details that you associate with east-asian culture like plenty of neon lights, (k-)pop, cuteness everywhere, typical school uniforms, some big shopping malls (but it's a town so it's shopping streets full of little shops), very well packaged food even if it’s fruits, extreme politeness, face masks, etc…. It has stuff to do around, with bars and clubs, restaurants, bike paths and parks, and a curiously varied expat community, bigger than usual because in this country English teachers need to be native and there’s plenty of people from abroad teaching.
I found a very small apartment for me on the second day, small but ideal for this period, and it even included a bike (well, “included”, it was the bike of someone that lived there before and left it, and the man renting the place said he was going to throw it away, so instead I’m able to keep it^^) I will be using to move around. I also already ordered some furniture online, which is currently travelling towards it, and in general this first contact went very well.

The only thing it may still cause issues is the food. Food is amazing, similar to Chinese and Japanese, really tasty and healthy…but there’s plenty of things that are spicy, very spicy. And I cannot handle that…so unless I’m with a local or an expat with experience, I go to a place I already know and order the same thing, which may make me bored of the thing fast if I don’t manage to get a wider selection of places…

I’ve also heard that some processes of the burocracy are very very slow, and for example getting a simple SIM card will not be easy…but there’s open wifis with really good speeds everywhere, so it’s not a big concern at the moment….

Anyway, all in all I’m very happy with this new place I’m getting the chance to discover^^

Daily Deadlock

Some time ago it rained a bit. When leaving work I had the option to take a taxi, and I did. I will not make the same mistake another time in a rainy day...

To explain, this is Rio:

In this area there are around 15 million people. And every day, we all need to go to work.

Now, we have two main areas, the rich zones in the south(inside the red areas) and the poor zones in the north:

The poor zones tend to start working earlier,  and they basically go to work to provide services in the rich zones:

The rich zones work concentrates in the centre,  where there is a lot of offices. The centre is considered to be only this:

Now, the thing about Rio is that, do you see these green marked areas? Those are mountains.

And I mean mountains. The green right area's highest point is 700m. In the coast there are 350m and 500m mountains. Basically they sprout from the ground and get high fast, giving Rio this peculiar look:

So, if you check the map again, you'll notice that most central and rich areas are actually surrounded by mountains. As in completely surrounded. No chance in hell to make a superhighway connecting them.

So, we get tunnels or "valleys" of two lanes in each direction. Mostly in these points:

Of course, we cannot forget people coming from other cities to work, which have these entry points too:

Now, check what's the subway line available to help move all these people around these very closed areas with very specific and sparse entry points:

(this is an approximation of the subway, but you get the idea)

So basically most people need to take cars or buses. Of course the rich areas use cars, but the poor areas also have plenty of those.

This results in a daily clusterfuck of epic proportions. People in the south zone may take up to two hours to reach the centre, and 2 more to get back. If you do this in the middle of the night the route takes 20 minutes.

When it rains especially, seeing as how people clearly dissolve under the rain, people that maybe would walk a bit and take buses or metro in a clear day takes car or taxi.

The average time to go from the south rich area in the centre and the actual business centre is 2 hours during rush hour. Outside rush hour it's actually 20 minutes. And when it rains, you just better forget to take the car becasue then moving just from the business centre towards Zona Sul, where Copacabana is, can take already more than one hour....

Escape to Iguazú (II)

After the day in the Brazilian side, we reached the border to Argentina.  The border was weird, with two big areas, one for each country, where they could check passports and a shop in the middle. There was a bridge that had the point where the two countries met, and I saw pictures before if that bridge as if there were no barriers between them, when the fact is that the barriers are before that point.

We didn't get stopped in the Brazilian side, which was a bit strange, but well, we thought that was normal for people going away. In Argentina we had no problem and they just stamped out passports, and then we got to the hotel using a bus to wars the city.

The Argentinian city was similar to Brazil,  but with some differences. It looked as poor in a way, but a little more touristic as well, with plenty of advertisements about hotels, and with streets slightly more pedestrian - friendly than in Brazil. It also looked. .well, red. The terrain had red soil, and there was plenty of red bricks as well.

This hotel was much much worse than the Brazilian one. It was more like a hostel, a small room with lots of dust, almost no electric plugs, no air conditioning, very poor wifi coverage...

I did not do the reservation, so I don't know how many stars the hotel advertised. As long as they indicated 2 or less I guess it's fine, because it definitely was not 3 by far. Still,there were little details that even if you have 1 or 2 stars are shameful, like having to ask them to give toilett paper and towels...

Anyway, we managed to check-in and then go eat to some restaurant nearby. For some reason it was hard to find one open, and we ended up into a kilo place,like in Brazil, where you weight your food and pay for kg, but with some different dishes, more pasta and, of course, bread. In Brazil they don't usually include bread, and it was nice to have some^^.

The place was nothing special though, and we went back to the hotel and finally got a shower, slept and rested.

The next morning turned out to be half-sunny, so it was less likely it would rain, which was good. The breakfast here was not full of options, but it came with dulce de Leche (boiled condensed milk), tipically Argentinian and really tasty^^. It took a while to get ready and then we went to the park area.

We had been told the Argentinian side was bigger, and that's true. It was also much better done and indicated. The area looked more like a theme park, but it was very clear where you were, the paths you needed to take and even the stairs you would find on the way. With sunny weather with some clouds,  everything looked very nice but soon it was really hot too.

Since we had two days to spend here, we decided to take the lower route today and then do the higher one during the next. There was also the devil's gorge, which we would visit if we could at some point. First we had to walk a bit around the forest, and we started seeing plenty of bugs and butterflies, some Quatis (there were also on this side, and they also stole food but seemed more taken care of) and some scarily big ants and insects.

The lower road went between the forest and the river,  but at a very nice level, between the high side of the river and the low side. And while the Brazilian side gave you a view from afar, this side was right next to the waterfalls. The path was an elevated metal platform, which means that in some sections you crossed small streams that formed between two consecutive small waterfalls. It was quite impressive to see them that close, and the whole area was really green and beautiful. There were also some panoramic viewpoints, and in general it was a great path.

After walking for a bit, the path allowed you to go almost under a medium -sized waterfall. It created a big cloud of constant small drops,  and the closer you walked the more soaked you got. It was nice and refreshing, and also quite curious to see everything so close. There is something in watching do much water moving and falling that is hypnotic,  together with the white noise it makes...

We got a bit wet, not as much as other people, and we continued. In the way we also managed to see a lizard that was quite big, at least compared with most lizards we have seen...it was black, and had quite a big head and mouth,  at least as long as my forearm. It seemed to be wild but apparently used to have people around, although it maintained a distance with all the tourists...

In the end we finished this path quite earlier than we thought, after just a couple of hours. Since we still had plenty of time, we decided to also visit the devil's gorge.

To reach the devil's gorge, you had to take a small touristic train that was marginally faster than walking, but they didn't allow you to walk there so we had to use it. When we reached the gorge's station there were a huge number of butterflies flying around, drinking water from the wet floor next to a fountain for the visitors. Elay was very happy about this and "danced" with the butterflies (probably killing some, even if we tried to tell him to be careful ). It was really beautiful, but also very hot. We drank and watered our heads, and we started to walk towards the gorge.

This path was also a metallic platform on top of the higher part of the river. You could not see the waterfalls from there, and we knew it would take a while to reach the gorge. There were some islands from time to time, that offered cover from the sun, which was very bright and hot at that moment. I believe it took us around 20 minutes to reach the end of the path,  and it was very full of people and very hot with no shadows, but was the most impressive place probably.

The gorge was the area of the biggest section of waterfalls, moving the biggest ammount of water. A massive volume of water kept falling down quite a big distance, making a lot of noise and movement, and making big raindrop clouds. There was also plenty of rainbows, and in general it was really beautiful and brutal too.

With that we finished our first day, we went back to the city and had dinner in a nice place next to the hotel. We were tired after the heat (the walking was ok, we didn't do that much distance actually), so we went to sleep early.

The next day was our last, so we had to check out of the hotel. While crappy, it is true that the people managing it were nice enough. After having the same breakfast as the previous day we left one suitcase in the bus station lockers and went back to the park.

If it was your second day visiting, there was a discount, but they asked that you marked the ticket when leaving,  which was stupid since there was no one at the exit to mark it or explain this to you. At least they also accepted photos from the previous day as proof, so we got the discount.

Today we wanted to do the high path of the waterfalls, that went at the level of the river before falling, and that was short enough to let us plenty of time to go back to the Brazilian side and get to the airport. This path was, in our opinion, not as spectacular.  Sure, you could see most waterfalls from above, but it felt nicer to be next to them in the lower path. However, the nature around us was impressive, of course. We even saw a small cocrodile, and probably the biggest wild spider I have ever seen waiting in its web in the middle of the river, between two trees...

Anyway, we finished the day and went back to the bus station to start our trip to the Brazilian airport. After checking times and prices, we decided to get a taxi directly there, since buses just left you at the border and brought you to the Brazilian city center, which means it took twice as much time with any luck, and we didn't have that many hours until out flight.

With the taxi we arrived to the border, and the taxi driver gave us some papers to fill for the Brazilian border. However, we had not been stop at the Brazilian border when going to Argentina. The driver told us we should have been stopped, and that it was best then to just say we didn't have papers and we lived in Brazil.

We passed the Argentinian control without problems, and we were getting ready to lose a lot of time in the Brazilian control so we could explain out situation. However, once again the Brazilian border didn't even stop us. Apparently they do have controls, but because they have agreements with Argentina they just check people from time to time, and private cars and taxis pass without stops plenty or times. So, we visited Argentina with it leaving Brazil, according to our passports.

After this we had no other trouble, we boarded the plane and came back home. It was quite a nice and impressive visit, definitely recommended for anyone that gets the chance to go^^.

Escape to Iguazú(I)

I haven't explained anything about trips for a while..because we haven't visited anything new, that's true..but well, let's explain the latest one...

After working weekends,  we get days off to select afterwards. I usually take them as soon as possible,  but sometimes 2 or 3 accumulate.

Recently I've done this on purpose, so last week I took Tuesday to Thursday as days off, so we could travel to Iguazú on monday night.

Everybody who works here in Rio has traveled or plans to travel to Iguazú. It is a popular destination, and agencies offer packages to get there and sleep, but I didn't really do any research about what is in there, apart from knowing it had big waterfalls. It was also a natural border (the river) between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.

We spent one night in the Brazilian side, and two nights in the Argentinian side. Each side has a natural park that you need to pay to enter, and some other stuff to do around.

So, on Monday night we took a 2-hour flight to Foz de Iguazu. The Brazilian hotel was pretty good, with nice enough rooms and nice breakfast, apart from an awesome pool that we didn't have time to use but looked nice. We slept there and on tuesday we grabbed the bus that goes there(if you are not careful you will get scammed with price of transportation ).

This day was all gray and cloudy, and forecast warned about rain and storms. Far away we could see some big black stormy clouds coming our way, but well, nothing we could do about it.

The Brazilian park had another bus to bring you close to the waterfall areas. We stopped in the middle of the way and walked around the forest. First thing we saw was a warning about Quatis. We didn't know what animal was that, but got the point of not trying to feed them. We reached the first observation post, and yes, I can see why it is a popular destination.

The waterfalls are massive, and really really big. There's lots of green around it (not equatorial jungle, but more like tropical,  still pretty dense and green and humid), and there is lots and lots and lots of waterfalls. From that side, you can see them from far away and it is impressive the ammount of water that they're moving,  and the spray they create. You could literally see the water making "clouds" right there, many tiny little drops floating up towards you or towards the sky. This together with the green of the forest gives an amazing view.

On the next open area, we found Quatis.

Quatis are a type of mammal that is probably related to Raccoons. They move similarly, and act similarly. The ones in this area have adapted quite well to humans,  and are totally shameless, trying to check your bags and making puppy eyes for food. We were shooing them away from our son (who of course was very happy to see them and wanted to touch them, but was so excited it would have resulted in him hitting them), that was in the stroller, but they kept checking it and trying to grab our bags. In the end, while opening one pocket of the stroller they saw a bag of dried apples, and one of them jumped on it and stole the whole bag.

It was actually very funny, because it was not something that would be bad for them (just dried apples) nor anything we needed, but we could see that, while cute, they were shameless and problematic...

We continued our walk and found some stairs. This was very annoying, because we had the stroller with us,and previously there was no indication about them. We even passed areas that had ramps next to some steps, as if this was the norm in all the park. So we had to move through stairs several times during the day...

We passed several nice observation points, and in one of them we saw that the storm clouds we noticed during the morning were moving quite fast. They looked really awesome, as if they were unfolding, and they seemed to have a very liquid texture. There was especially dark sections moving at different speed than the rest...and for a bit we enjoyed the show without realizing their movement.

Then we saw that they were moving towards us at high speed and we had an "oh crap" moment.

We covered ourselves and the stroller with raincoats, and just managed to get ready before it started to pour water in top of us, right after the beautiful clouds passed us overhead...

This put an end to the visit, and we just run through paths and stairs to the restaurant area, which had pretty good views from far away of the top of the waterfalls and one of the main sections called the devil's gorge...

We could also see the Argentinian side from there, and there were platforms on top of the river and next to the waterfalls. It looked curious, we needed to check that next day...

We managed to eat, the rain calmed down, and we went out of the natural park to visit a bird park next to it.

This park was like a zoo, but bird-based and taking advantage of the nature around it. It claimed to be a place to rescue birds, and it is true more cages were rather big, but it is still a zoo, and a touristic one...

Anyway, I don't know if they trained the birds in there, but most of then were very sociable,  with some of them jumping towards us when they saw us. Our son was extremely happy about it and keep making happy noises.

And then we went to one of the cages, since the path entered some of them and let you be around the birds. These were big caged areas, and it was nice to see them close. However, our son was eating a chicken stick at that moment...I thought they would tell us we could not do that,  but nobody said anything...

Anyway, we were in this really big cage, and we saw some pretty big birds walking around, and some tucans. I really like tucans, and we had seen some free ones in Rio, but it was still nice to see different types around.

Then, several things happened. First, we were being followed by a number of walking birds, and we noticed that they were looking at our son's food. We shooed them away, but then a small tucan, for whatever reason, started to harass my wife trying to touch her toes, until it actually bit her a bit.

While trying to send the little tucan away, I turned around to see a big black walking bird stealing the chicken finger from our son (he maybe got scared for a sec but he was also happy that the birds were that close), and ran away followed by other big birds, who started stealing the food from one another....

It was very chaotic for a moment...and apart from the little tucan's attack, what the other birds did was funny but worrying...

After that we passed other cages, but we made sure to not have food around us...

In one of them we also found another tucan(a big one this time), this one apparently sociable and very cute, just sitting in a railing of a bridge that crossed the stream. We took pictures of it, and some people even caressed it...it seemed not to mind, although if some person was too annoying it just took some steps away, indicating that it was enough..I could not resist a gentle tap with one finger, and it just looked at me^^.

After the last tucan, and considering this one had a beak twice as big, my wife just looked at it from a distance, while taking pictures...

During the visit it started to rain again, which was annoying. Most birds at least had a place to cover themselves, but the rest of the visit happened much quicker after this. I will only mention that there was a big cage you could enter that had butterflies and hummingbirds, and it was quite impressive, especially the butterflies, big as my hand....but then they showed you the caterpillars, and they were also that big^^'.

We finished the visit quite wet, and returned to the city to grab a taxi to the Argentinian border, really hoping the hotel in there would also be nice and wanting to eat and take a warm shower after the wet rainy day...

I'll explain the other two days in another post.

Working in Integration

When people ask me what I studied or in which field do I work and I say IT they always ask me if I develop. When I say no, if they know a little about IT, they ask if I test or if I'm a system administrator. And I keep saying "No", which just confuses people. In the end I say that I "integrate", which people take as if i have said "assimilate" or some other word that, while kind of knowing the meaning, doesn't tell you anything....

In one of my earliest long posts I mentioned a little what does it means, but I though I'd spent some time explaining it a bit more...

Integration, for starters, is really a meaningless word. It means to basically put everything together, and in a way that's what I do, but not really...

I do not program, apart from sometimes automatizing some tasks. I do not test much, although there is some testing. I do not administrate systems, although I do connect to servers and run things in there sometimes.

What I do mostly is to act as a firewall between all the teams involved in providing a service and the final users and clients. I'm also (in theory) the person who should know more about a service so, when issues arise, the right team receives work.

This is still pretty vague and sounds as if I spent all day sitting in my chair and twirling my fingers waiting for people to contact me.. so, let me explain  a bit more..

I plan, or help plan, things. For example, we have a new version of the system and we need to install. The team that installs needs to tell me how long will they take and when they can start doing it, and then I go to the users, check what are they doing the day we need to install and plan when can we do it. I then prepare all the paperwork necessary, including requests to the team that installs about what needs to be installed and where.

We also have paperwork(well, it's all Web-based and through computers, but it is basically bureaucracy) about what do we have in our servers and computers, so i do paperwork updating these versions once new deliveries arrive.

Another important part of the job is to help the users  (mostly testers, except for the operational period when we're actually live and the users change) to use the system. Loooots of times someone comes to me and says "your system is not working".

After punishing them adequately for their lack of details regarding what is really not working or in what way it is not working(by being adequately sarcastic or passive-aggressive or as clear as they were when answering about it), I go to where they had the problem to visually see what they mean , check the system and the different monitoring tools we have to check the system status (here I'm not talking about system administration but more on the line of checking logs to see what our application says it's wrong), and find the cause of the issue and a solution. If the cause is not evident, finding a solution first also works.

Most of the time the solution is to smack them on the head and point them to the fact that they missed a step when doing the initialization steps. However, sometimes I need to smack someone in my team (or myself) for breaking something temporarily after having done something stupid,  or passing the problem to another team more qualified to know what's wrong. This could range from security and network teams (the real sysadmins) if things are slow or crashing for no reason, to the company that produces the data that our system reads (because they are giving us the data in a crappy format), to the people that actually prepare configuration files and parameters of the system during installation, or to the developers if we really have a bug in our code. A big part of the job is this, to investigate problems until you can figure out more or less what is happening,  why, and even ways we can fix it.

As usual, the trick is knowing enough to send to the correct team while offering a solution or workaround if possible. It is like in that joke where a guy goes to fix a machine, presses one button and everything works, and charges a lot of money for it. In the detailed bill, he writes that pressing the button costs one dollar, and the rest is the cost of knowing which button....

We have plenty of users and special moments when we need to give extra help, so I have a team that helps me in doing all that...so, I also need to teach my team, prioritize problems and plan stuff with them like vacations and such things .

I also need to speak with the clients, understand what they want and try to make sure they are happy and that when they check the service nothing breaks.

Apart from all that, I help to guide where the service will go in the future. This is not my job directly, but by having the knowledge about how people use it, my opinions in the matter are at least considered, and when something is a pain in the ass to do I try to warn so it gets improved later on. As part of this, I need to manage all petitions to change stuff in my service. Again, this is mostly paperwork, but you can see which changes have been requested, when are they going to be done and stuff like that. Another part of the job precisely is to check that these changes have been done at the time people planned to be done.

Since all this means interacting with other companies and other teams in different parts of the world, there's lots of meetings, conference calls, presentations, trainings, etc...in some of them I am presenting, in some of them I am listening only and in some of them I'm commenting on stuff.

I also do some testing, but not much. I just test things that could not be tested before. For example, you may have tested part A of a system, and it's fine, but after installation you have A connected to B and C, receiving from F and saying hi to Z every 10 minutes...and you cannot test all that until the whole thing is in place, especially because sometimes Z and F are done by another company. Most of this test is done by another team, but my team sometimes needs to test one of those interactions(like A with C, for example).

Another important aspect is to calm down tempers...as the guy people go when there is a problem, part of this job is to make sure there are no panics and things are treated with the level of importance they deserve. If we really need to panic I will say so,  but I also need to assure users and show that it is going to be fine and we're working on it, that things are under control. Perception is very important, and sometimes it does not match with reality. Therefore you need to calm down things, shown is not that bad, offer solutions, etc, not only until things work but also until people realize things work.

Finally, there is periods called operational periods where we give extra help doing work shifts(yes, that means night and weekends sometimes). These periods can be testing periods or the real thing, but in anyway during these periods we work from this nicer area that looks like NASA with lots of screens and projectors and TVs. From there we need to use our systems to prepare the sevice to be live. During the testing phase the users do that, but if we are in operations my team does it. We also practice steps required to do each task, and therefore I need to write plenty of documents about these steps, and improve them from time to time. This way anyone with some knowledge of the project can theoretically do these steps. It's usually in these steps that we can try to do some scripts or little programs that are not oficial but that make our life's easier, but that's the extend of our programming in this position.

While in operations we also take care if issues differently, with more pressure on fixing things faster and in any way possible. Again, all this without touching code, just using back doors,  emergency solutions and our knowledge of the systems. This period also means we have several teams together so we need to interact with all of them,  learn communication channels and how to propagate information to the people that will come next day. I also need to manage the people in my team in these periods, ask for reports, do daily reports myself, track problems, all that...

I don't know if these explanations help to give an idea of the type of job or the level of work we have, but I can tell that it fills our days quite completely, and the fact we are in front of the clients makes everything more intense, fast and stressful...but I do kind of enjoy this^^

Our Apartment's Distribution

Haven't written a long post in a while....we're back from Christmas holidays in Barcelona. We had fun but the amount of visits and meetings was brutal and we ended up really tired...

Now back here we will have several people coming to Rio to visit, which is nice^^. However,  I will also need to do a lot of work in this period, because I have been given several tasks to do that are important, but a pain in the ass to prepare....and I'm in this status of "oh, so much work to do", and then delaying starting working on the worst part...

Anyway, there's something new and nice that we have done while in Barcelona. We bought the apartment in may, but the apartment needed to be rebuild. That's also a lot of work and decisions...but we've made an important one, the distribution.

Here's an image of the distribution we have chosen:

As you can see, there's lots of space, but we wanted to have 4 rooms and 2 toilet,  so that already limits things quite a lot. It was hard to see how this would fit and be nice at the same time...

The end result is that we almost won't have corridors, so we save space. Instead we will reach the kitchen and the dining room from the entrance,  and the dining room is connected to the living room but can be separated at will. This way the living room is smaller but without having to worry about the table we win a lot of space.

The kitchen is big enough, and there's a window between kitchen and dining table which makes it nicer and more sociable to be preparing food. We also have a storage room/washing machine room, where we can handle all the laundry process without needing to occupy other spaces and giving us also a lot of storage volume.

Next to the living room we'll have a guest room/office. This space probably is the one that most people said to be not sure if it was needed, but we think it is nice to have and allow us to divide the living room from guests sleeping (in plenty of places the coach doubles as the guests' bed), while also giving us an office area next to the centre of the house.

The main toilet is close to everything, at the centre, so anyone can access it. Then we have two possible kid rooms, one a little smaller than the other, but we know that with the right furniture this is a very small difference.

Our room is big but as small as possible, with a nice extra second toilet. The funnier part is probably the shower, which is basically in the interior terrace, a funny position that made us doubt, but in the end we though it would be fine.

All windows are exterior and we believe the will be lots of light, also because it is a 5th floor so we're quite high.

The furniture indicated in there it's nor fixed yet, only kitchen and toilets will really be like that, so we don't know yet how everything will turn out, but it is exciting to have already decided on this^^.

Now we need still to agree about a lot of details regarding electric cabling and walls, then there's the budget planning in which we may need to change something and agree on materials and different things, and finally the actual construction  will take place...still a lot of things to do....

But it feels nice to be closer to seeing the final result ^^