We had plans to go to Japan for our winter vacation, but after Leta got sick over christmas in Seoul she never seemed to get better. Later in the week, I seemed to catch her cough and we decided to go to the Ear-Nose-and-Throat doctor. This was an interesting experience in itself, but I was discouraged when he diagnosed both Leta and I with bronchitis. So instead of traveling across the length of Japan by train and spending New Years with Leta's family, it was looking like we were going to have to stay home and rest. At first this seemed like a terrifying prospect, as we aren't going to get another vacation for months. It's still a little disappointing, but we've managed to stay occupied by taking day trips. Here are a few of the different things that have made this vacation time worthwhile.
I'll start with my first experience at the Korean doctors office. It was below freezing as we made our way to the doctor's about 15 minutes walk away. My bronchitis was mostly characterized by serious chest pain that got worse with every cough or with heavy breathing, especially out in the cold. We didn't have to wait long once we got there and it wasn't a problem that we couldn't communicate with the administrative staff. The doctor sat us down in an examination chair and asked us a bunch of questions in broken but pretty decent english. He did all the normal stuff, listening to breathing with a stethoscope and making you say 'ahhhh' with a tongue depressor, but he also used some weird thing to spray up my nose. At the end of the visit, he had us breathe mist from this face mask thing and gave us both an intermuscular shot in the butt. On our way out, I was happy to learn that we've got great health care as we paid our 3 dollars each for the visit and picked up our prescription.
I had always heard stories, from Leta and others, about the 'asian way' of doing medicine being frustrating to someone who wants to know what they're taking, but somehow I expected to overcome this process. I was wrong. The pharmacist gave us little wax packets full of 4 pills that she told us to take 3 times a day after meals as well as these little packets of what we later found out were herbal cough syrup. I spent hours at home trying to figure out what these pills were by their markings, but didn't have any luck. I still had two days of work left before vacation and these were very difficult, as it's hard to maintain order in a classroom without heavy breathing. By Saturday, I decided to go back and see the doctor because the medicine he'd given me didn't have enough painkillers in them. This time the office was more crowded and I was more sick, but after a bit of explaining, some more time on the ventilator and another shot in the butt, I had another prescription for whatever it was that he decided would help. Leta and I both went back to see the doctor on Tuesday, as he had only given us medication for that long. The visit was the same procedure, except this time he checked my ears for some reason. Much to my surprise, he told me that there was a big wax build-up in my right ear and pulled out this big plug of hair and wax a little over a centimeter long and the size of a pencil eraser. He told me I would hear better, which I guess I have, even though I hadn't noticed any problem before. At this point the bronchitis is in its last stages and the chest pain is getting better.
One of the teachers, Ivory, had also stayed in Naju rather than going somewhere for her vacation time. The three of us went into Gwangju on Tuesday to see a movie. We decided to see the new 007 movie Casino Royale, even though I didn't have much hope for it with its new Bond actor and seemingly played out premise. I was very much surprised and the movie absolutely rocked, as one of the best action movies I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it was also a longer movie than we'd counted on and by the time we got out we had missed the last bus home. The last busses run sometime around 11pm, so I hadn't yet had a chance to experience the late-night life of Gwangju. Since we were going to have to drop thirty bucks on a 45-minute cab ride regardless of when we left, we took this as an opportunity to stay late. We tried a couple of the foreigner bars, but nobody was out on a Tuesday night. We decided to stay at this German bar anyways and the weizen beer was *fantastic*. Apparently the guy had studied beer-making in Germany and the draft tasted so fresh that it brought back memories of beer gardens in Munich. After awhile we decided to go to a karaoke room and try to sing as best as we could with our injured lungs. It was a good time and we didn't end up leaving for home until 2:30am. The cabby was cool and he drove safely as there was a thick fog.
The next day we decided that we were going to go to Costco in Daejon. This entailed a three hour train ride more than halfway across the country, but it still seemed like a good idea. I grabbed an empty suitcase, we picked up some tuna sushi at the grocery store and caught a bus to the train station in a part of town that I didn't even know existed. I hadn't experienced the train system in Korea yet, so that was something new and exciting. They were cheap, as I expected, with our tickets costing about $12 each way. I had forgotten how much more enjoyable it is to travel by train than by bus, with no traffic, bumps, swerves or turns. It was a good opportunity to see farmland and traditional houses. The chairs also turned around and so for the first half of the trip Ivory taught me how to play two-player Spades. When we got there, there was a little bit of drama as we discovered that we could either stay 2.5 or 6 hours because of how the trains were running. I didn't think only staying the two and a half hours would be enough time to see the Costco and eat dinner, but Leta didn't want to leave for home as late as midnight. She got her way.
The Costco was only a couple minutes walk from the station, so getting there was easy. Right by the entrance was the display of digital cameras and mp3 players; two items that Leta and I had both agreed we didn't want to go any longer without. I had bought a 1gb mp3 player, but it soon became obvious that this wasn't holding enough music and I wanted something bigger. Leta thought that it was big enough for her music needs and I had been looking at the prices of iPods, so when I discovered that I could get one for only a little more than they were selling for in the U.S. I got one right away. We also picked up a Sony camera with decent enough specs for us for about $150. So, about twenty steps into Costco, we had already spent over 400 bucks. After this we decided it might be best to skip the electronics floor of Costco and we went downstairs to the food area. As the conveyor-belt escalator brought us in view of the food, it was like my heart lit up. I felt like somebody from Soviet Russia experiencing all of the wholesome warmth of idealistic capitalism all at once as I gazed over aisles and aisles of familiar foods in bulk. Right away, I started grabbing things like real coffee, blocks of cheddar cheese, jumbo packs of those sweet-and-salty granola bars and big fat jars of peanut butter and jugs of sour cream. It was beautiful.
It somehow only took us an hour to pore over every shelf in every aisle of the food section, but our cart was full so we checked out. In check-out we found out that we weren't going to be able to use our Mastercard (only Samsung cards were accepted), so I went to use the ATM. To my dismay, there was no english option. I tried punching buttons anyway, but to no avail. Intermittent messages like "card not accepted" and "not supported" got me sweating, as Leta waited at the end of the check-out. I decided to ask the woman at the customer service counter to come help me figure out the ATM. Even though she spoke no english, a few hand gestures and nods had her punching in the necessary buttons. I watched how she did it and repeated the process a couple more times, as the maximum withdrawal was $200. In the end, our bill came to $606, which is by far the most I've ever spent shopping, but I was just relieved that the ATM hadn't screwed us over. We had dinner at the Costco cafeteria, eating familiar food like seafood chowder, 'chicken bakes' and chicken caesar salad. Between the three of us, we had about 3x as much as the suitcase would hold and in twice as many boxes as we could manage to carry. Outside the Costco, we managed to get everything into a form that we could just barely drag to the train station a block away. Once there, we bought some big reusable shopping bags and managed to fit everything in those except for one box of lighter food and the 24-pack of Doctor Pepper. The train ride home went much faster. The taxi driver flagged us down before we even managed to get past the turnstyles. As we were loading up the trunk, he kept saying 'ahh american??' and pointing at all the food. We kept telling him 'no, Daejon. Costco.' but he didn't get it. He asked if he could have a Doctor Pepper and Ivory gave him one, but then he wanted one of her two big bags of tortilla chips too. He was pushy about it, and sort of started to pout when she just opened the bag and gave him some. It was pretty hilarious.
I spent the rest of the night taming my iPod, which seemed like a daunting task at first. I'm going to have to pause my week and talk about my new toy for a bit. I had heard that the way iPods worked was that you had to use iTunes and that the program would automatically 'sync' the library of the player and the computer to be the same; whether that meant deleting songs or not. I wanted to get past this however I could, as my whole rationale for buying an iPod had been to get my music library away from the computer. Plus, I've only got about 5 gigs to work with on this hard drive and the movies and music that occupy this space are always changing as they are burnt to CD to make room for new stuff. So, the idea of only being able to have the same library on my 30gb iPod as on my computer is not what I wanted. Eventually, I set the thing up so that it didn't do anything 'automatically' as far as transfering files or 'sync'ing. I found a barebones tool that would load the iPod's library every time it was plugged into the computer, allowed you to add files to that library and then to load those files into the iPod's system. See, most mp3 players are just removable hard disks that will play any compatible music files stored on them. iPods don't work like that, and they need you to go through a special (and long) process of putting the music into its systems. So, that's what I've been doing with all my spare time since. I've got things down pretty well and I don't even have iTunes installed on my computer anymore, but I've all but given up on being able to put video on the thing.
Anyways. On Thursday, we decided we were going to take one last trip of the vacation to a city an hour away called Mokpo. We took the train again and this time it cost us three bucks. At this point, I've just got to say that transporation in Korea is so inexpensive that it continues to amaze me every time I decide to travel; whether bus, train or taxi. We got to Mokpo without really having anything planned, so when Ivory suggested we go on a ferry ride nobody had any objections. We walked through side streets and putrid fish markets (very much regret not taking a picture) on our way to the docks. There were some big fish, but far more weird different sea creature things. There were a lot of these manta-ray-type things called 'skate' that they're famous for. There were also octopi, shrimp, all kinds of mollusks, and these weird little things that looked like long chubby fingers. Apparently, they eat these while they're still a little bit alive and they cling to your chop sticks.. but that sounded really disgusting to me.
We got to the docks, but the building that Ivory had remembered the ferry being in had been demolished. After going into a couple of buildings that weren't the right ones, we found the counter we were looking for and barely managed to get on the ferry before it left. The ride was beautiful and halfway through I started noticing little flashes of grey in the water that turned out to be dolphins! By the end of the ferry ride I had seen more than a dozen of these little buddies hopping along on the top of the water, which was a first for me outside a zoo. After the ferry, we went to a restaurant where we all got some kind of seafood noodle surprise that we didn't mean to order. I ate all of Leta's little octopus legs and slimy little things that tasted like the bottom of a lake. We were tired and we hadn't managed to figure out what to do next, so we just went home. The dolphins had made the whole thing worth it.
So that's been my week. I've got my iPod more than half full at this point, which has taken dozens of hours of diligent organization and attention to detail. I'll end with a list of the music that I've got on it so far, which is coming close to the limits of my collection. The Beatles, Ben Folds Five, Blind Melon, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Broken Social Scene, Cat Stevens, Counting Crows, Death Cab for Cutie, dj GT, Dropkick Murphys, Feist, Flogging Molly, Foo Fighters, Hillsongs, Ja Rule, Jars of Clay, Johnny Cash, Kanye West, Manu Chao, Neutral Milk Hotel, No Use for a Name, NOFX, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Phish, Pink Floyd, John Prine, Propagandhi, Queen, R.E.M., Radiohead, Rise Against, Ry Parish-Siggelkow, Santana, Seu Jorge, Slowdive, Smashing Pumpkins, the Trainspotting and Buena Vista Social Club soundtracks, Sufjan Stevens, System of a Down, Talking Heads, The Cure, The Decemberists, The Killers, The Offspring, The Pogues, The Postal Service, The Shins, The Verves, The Wailers, Third Eye Blind, Tom Waits, Tori Amos, Ween, and Wilco. I've also got some podcasts from the Atlantic Free Press Journalist and Democracy Now!, Jon Stewart's "America - A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction," some Korean traditional stories and some TTC lectures: Ideas in Politics, Argumentation, History of Russia, Machiavelli in Context, Popes and the Papacy: A History, and Interpreting the 20th Century.
