Foreigners find their feet in gritty Czech city
OSTRAVA, Czech Republic (AFP) — Fresh from her first Czech lesson and an accompanying headache, Kyoung Mi-Park poked at the chicken and boiled potatoes on her plate and pondered her family's difficult adjustment to life in a gritty Czech industrial city.
The 36-year old former elementary teacher and two daughters reluctantly left South Korea's second city Pusan to follow her husband on a five year mission to Ostrava, a place she had never heard of, where South Korean multinational Hyundai is establishing its first European car plant nearby.
Around 70 foreign families have flowed into Ostrava, two-thirds of them Korean, on the back of the recent investment boom with more arrivals in the pipeline, according to Eva Kralikova, charged by the regional authority with cushioning the cultural shock for the families of foreign managers.
That project, launched at the start of the year because of the boom, is the first of its kind in the Czech Republic.
The most important investor, Hyundai, currently has 70 Korean managers in Ostrava and at the Nosovice car plant site around 20 kilometres (13 miles) away. That should rise to 100 as the plant is equipped to reach its production capacity of 300,000 cars per year, explained the spokesman for Hyundai's Czech unit, Petr Vanek.
Kyoung is one of a fast growing band of expatriates to have arrived in the slipstream of the investment surge into the country's eastern heavy industrial heartland.
Her first impressions of a city, whose most famous recent son, tennis champion Ivan Lendl, opted for a life in the United States, were not encouraging.
"It was very grey when I arrived in March ... I was very gloomy and depressed," she admitted.
Even the underpowered light bulbs in the newly-built apartment complex, shared with about a dozen Korean families, seemed to mirror her mood as she tried to adapt armed with a 58-page rough guide in Korean to everything from the local plugs and tram network to spotting false bank notes.
"It was not very specific," she complained.
Kyoung's six- and eight-year-old daughters faced their own challenges at school in spite of previously having a mixed Korean-English language education.
"Food was a big problem for them. They asked me for packed lunches but I said 'No, you must get used to new food. If you do not want your food you will starve,'" she explained.
She says things have got better since she started meeting mothers in a similar situation but would clearly prefer her husband's contract were shorter.
"Five years is a long time," she sighed, pushing away her barely touched meal.
Fellow South Korean Sun Gi-Min said she lowered her expectations after nine years working at the Korean embassy in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.
"These are both former communist countries and, when you look at the buildings, look quite similar," she explained.
She is a weekday widow, seeing her husband, who works for leading auto parts supplier Sungwoo Hitech in neighbouring Slovakia, only at the weekends and with no certainty he will be transferred nearer.
Ostrava's two-year-old international school, attended by her six-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son, is her main reason for being in the city.
After a first few months spent in a battle to find and equip a flat, Sun says she now feels at home and has even developed a taste for Czech beer and food.
Ostrava's Indian community has also expanded to around eight families in the wake of billionaire Lakshmi Mittal's takeover of the country's biggest steelmaker, now named ArcelorMittal Ostrava.
Neeta Marwah arrived in May 2006 and, with only a smattering of Czech, admits she often creates confusion, such as the time grocers told her they did not sell airline tickets when she thought she was asking for pastry.
Dressed in a typical Indian sari, the 34-year-old from Delhi says she fell in love with Ostrava, which offers foreigners few of the luxury facilities of Prague or the Slovak capital Bratislava, from the start.
"The people are very warm," she said, adding how one elderly woman literally went out of her way to show her where to get off the tram.
For Kralikova, the trio are fortunate because some arrivees "hardly speak a word of English."
"The feeling of isolation is the worst problem," she noted at a regular meeting where her charges are invited to share their experiences.
Hyundai spokesman Vanek is doing his bit to spur cross-cultural contacts by taking up the company's free offer of Korean lessons, along with a handful of other Czechs, and has launched a crusade to encourage local bars to install Korean-language karaoke.
The automaker has, apparently, learnt its own lessons about cultural transfer. Obligatory Korean-style morning exercises, introduced but then dropped after resistance at Hyundai's Slovak sister company, Kia, will not be forced on their Czech workers. "You can do them or not, it will be purely voluntary," Vanek assured.
