September 13, 2015
Prague, Czech Republic: Meeting Korea's head of nuclear safety
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IN KOREAN, you start at the top of each word and read down. Then you go to the next word and do the same. The sentences themselves run from left to right, as they do in European languages, but the words or sounds within them run downwards. So if I've got this right, the top of the word is the vowel, the middle is the consonant and the bottom is the modifier which decides whether it's a verb, adjective or adverb.
How do I know this, you ask yourself. And the answer is that, really, I don't. It's what I grasped from being asked to breakfast this morning by the Korean scientific attaché to the embassies of the world and the retired head of safety and decommissioning at Korea's nuclear power stations. I have grasped as much Korean as you'd expect in the time it took to drink coffee and eat scrambled eggs.
Not much.
Ho Nam is a warm, friendly man and, above all, a cyclist.
"We are constantly fighting with the city of Seoul for better cycling paths", he says with a tone that suggests a mix of mischief and triumph.
We met because he and his younger colleague, Ami, whom he recruited from university in New Zealand where her family moved so she could perfect her English, were having a day off from a conference in Vienna.
Nam is now international coordinator of the World Council on Isotopes. Ami persuaded him to stay not in a swish hotel but a travellers' hostel, to meet people more interesting than the Samsonite tribe. In fact they nearly didn't get here at all because their first train went to Bratislava, capital of Slovakia to the south.
"We had to get out at the first station and go back to Vienna and start again", Nam says with the hint of a blush, because that's not a lapse you expect of people with nuclear safety in their charge.
The isotope work is voluntary, and the conference was in Vienna because that's where the honcho has his office and, anyway, it's a good place to be.
He, Ami and I didn't talk much of isotopes. I think they sensed pretty quickly that they weren't, er, my field of expertise. We talked instead of cycling and cycling folk, of how he too would love to roam the world but how, until he stops work for good in two or three years, his horizons will be rides up and down the Han river with his cycling mates.
"But you'll never get me on a bike," Ami says. "I've never ridden one and I don't intend to."
We parted company convinced we had made friends and promising to keep in touch. I think it's possible that we'd have met in some bland business hotel. But I think it's guaranteed if - as we did - we were to share a six-person dormitory in a travellers' hostel.
"I'm so pleased Ami suggested we stay here," Nam smiled. "The atmosphere is so much better..."
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