Let me introduce the people living in my apartment.
Hugo is French. He was born in Toulouse and studied computer science in Paris. Two years ago he met his Japanese girlfriend. The power of love gave him the dedication to learn 800 kanji in two years. There are special agreements between France and Japan, so he can stay with a "vacance-travaille" visa for one year, working as a waiter. Now I think that I'm learning more French than Japanese here.
Kim-san is Korean. He's a computer programmer for Hitachi. We make very long conversations. The problem is that, usually, Kim-san talks in Japanese with Hugo who then translates for me, and it seems that going from Japanese to French/English there's a very high compression ratio: minutes of conversation are condensed in a single sentence by Hugo. Lost in translation? it actually happens.
He is very lucky to have French and Italian consultants to help him match his ties and shirts.
Kahn-san is Kim-san's room-mate. He worked for Samsung in Korea (have you ever wondered who writes the software for your cell phone?).
I'm learning a lot about Korea. For example, I discovered that the Korean writing system (called Hangul) is one of the best engineered systems in the world. It's phonetic (one symbol-one sound, like Italian and Spanish, and unlike English, French, etc..) and syllabes are represented graphically.
Other people:
Yesterday we made a pasta-paati. I ran the show and sent them to buy the ingredients for carbonara (among them, ペコリノ - pecorino). It was really an adventure to cook carbonara with ham instead of bacon, anemic "fettuccine", strange coloured eggs and really suspicious cheese.
Here, carbonara meets "kimchi", a Korean dish: this encounter is just very wrong.
It wasn't so bad after all, but I really had a culture choc when they started to eat the Japanese way: bowl in the hand and lot of slurping.