Hey all! It’s been quite some time since I posted. Between my time traveling around Korea, hanging out in Cambodia, and then returning to the hectic life of winter camp my time has been all over the place. It’s also tax season and I need to readjust student loan payments because I’m broke and need to keep em low. Long story short; I’ve been up to my neck in paperwork!
So I’m going to do a smaller post because I am currently typing on a smaller machine. I figured out how to get my blog resources to load up on my outdated tablet (which is almost exclusively an e-reader now) so I can do some writing on the go. I’m also gonna do a Cambodia mega-post / podcast for the end of the week. It was such a journey! I will teach you how to Cambodia so that you too can have fun on $25/day or so! Ah I already miss it there! Korea is so cold it makes me want to sleep forever! Why must the world be colder than my bed?!?!
On the bright side, I got to leave Winter Camp early today because all the pipes in our school burst and no kids could come. Despite being a country with superior technology, crazy-cold winters, and humid summers, the idea of adjusting/building your buildings for temperature swings never occurred to Korea. The school doesn’t heat up during the closing-times, and the only rooms that do get heated are the ones that are occupied. The heaters are small and don’t work well. Today it was -23C outside which meant that the heaters were almost useless. Summertime the windows will be locked shut; no fan or air conditioning. Thankfully before the cold hit, I spent an hour learning how this devil-machine below works and now my floor-heating is set on a timer so I can keep warm and not lose all my noney to heating…and my pipes haven’t frozen or burst! (unlike my friends).
So currently I am in a little cafe named “Tom & Tom’s” in Jeonju because I just left the hospital… again… for the same problem as before. I’m eating some garlic bread with my coffee, and the guy drenched it in honey-butter; a substance that is either honey with a buttery taste in flavor…. or very buttery with a honey aftertaste. I got butter-honey ice cream once and it literally tasted like butter and I couldn’t finish it.
Korea is really in a “sweet” kick right now. I mean I’ve got a terrifying sweet tooth but I would die for something savory. I ordered this garlic bread thinking “ah this would be a savory side to go with my coffee!” (bread-based items are popular in cafe’s here… and waffles. so good!). Even pizza is very sweet. Like 80% of pizza places will put sweet potato under the cheese instead of sauce, especially if you get anything other than a cheese pizza. If it weren’t for the fact that cheese here is so unsatisfyingly bland, I would kill for a nice Boston cheese pizza. This pizza below has mashed sweet potato for sauce and is drenched in BBQ sauce. I’m dying for something that isn’t sweet!
Maybe my teeth will rot out and that will be my next trip to the doctors! I have such mixed feelings about the Korean medical system. On one hand it is very cheap, especially with my insurance. I mentioned this in a previous post about how when my back went out, getting consulted, x-rayed, and medicated only cost me $35 or so. I was rather impressed. It was fast, cheap, efficient, and worked out very well. Unfortunately this can only be said for basic medical conditions.
My trip to Cambodia had me come back with some kind of highly violent stomach bug. I was unable to eat anything but saltines and drink Polcari Sweat for three days and I lost 5lbs in a week. I went to the doctor on Sunday to learn that hospitals are closed on the weekends. Yep! If you gotta die, it has to be on one of your consecutive 5 working days. Oh! They also close at 5, so the moment you get out of work you are already boned! The hospital in my town is a smaller (medium sized really) facility. I went into the emergency room, where they keep the doctors in training for the emergency staff. I don’t know why, but the giggly nurses and the nervous intern doctor decided to give me “fluid therapy” which I then learned meant “hooking me up to an IV to chill around bored as hell for 3 hours.” I’ve never been hooked up to one of these before and so it was odd but whatever. I got three days worth of medicine, and three days later I was back to my violently ill self (doctors here don’t give you the amount you need to kick a sickness and it is bullshit. Meds are cheap here but you gotta see a doctor every time you need to refill. Like if the guy gave me a 1 week supply it would have made more sense but in every doctor I’ve visited gives me the same 3 day malarkey!!)
I also asked that doctor to do urine/blood testing but the hospital can’t do that on Sundays. Thankfully Tuesday we had so much snow that we got to leave Winter camp early and I went to see the doctor in Urology. I had some specific things I wanted to check for, and decided I would also do an STD / STI check because it’s something that I’ve been told I should do regularly especially since I’m seeing someone in the country. So first he tells me that he cant test for the things I want to be tested for. Next, he runs around the clinic yelling my name, and the STI/STD’s I wanted checked. Now everyone and their mother in Imsil now knows I’m getting STD/STI screening (which is a scary thing because 1. I am a foreigner and that reinforces negative stereotypes about us and 2. If my boss’s were to learn about this they WOULD question me and my job would be at risk.) Anyway all his yelling was for naught because they can only test for AIDS and he said since I wasn’t having physical symptoms of STDs/STI’s he wasn’t gonna waste his time checking me. I instead got referred to Jeonju Hospital which I was happier with because I was afraid if I did have something, it would only be a matter of time before everyone in Imsil found out and burned me at the stake.
I have mixed feelings about Jeonju hospital too. I went to the emergency room because I was told they will do testing at night. So right off it’s nice seeing a place that is mostly opened. I wrote down all my symptoms and what I wanted to have done in Korean, talked to a doctor (who tried getting me hooked onto “fluid therapy again which I had to refuse once they brought it over to me despite saying no), paid 60,000원 watched as the nurses ran up and down screaming my name and things I wanted to get tested for out loud. Finally they come over with a syringe and paper cup, I give them what they want. An hour passes, the doctor calls me over and tells me all the things I tested negative for… but none of those things include the stuff I asked for. Not a single damn one. I felt like Homer Simpson and he was Bart. Strangling a doctor in public is a good way to go to jail so I asked if he could test again but he just says “come back tomorrow.”
A week passes, and it is today! I only got to go because of the pipes bursting, no biggie. Arrived by 2pm. It was better and worse this time. One of the nurses; a very beautiful nurse whom I would guess was maybe 5 years older than me is trying to help me out the whole time. I saw two doctors before they get me to the Urology department… which I had written on a piece of paper in Korean to avoid this issue. The doctors who I talked to before they got me to urology were awful! Once again an entire wing of the hospital got to learn about how I wanted to check for STD’s and STI’s. He then asked me “why?” “where do you work?” “yeah but why?” “oh personal reason? Want me to send to your boss?” I lied about my town and work place because it was the last thing I needed to worry about. Apparently the idea of regular testing for safety is an avante guard concept here. Apparently my promiscuous life style is bending all the rules of Korean society and my want to be safe is me fighting the man! I don’t know. When they got me to the urologist he was great. Amazing English, no prying questions, closed the door before asking about my symptoms/reasons. Didn’t seem so bugged out about me wanting my junk to be safe and disease free, and was familiar with the parasite I wanted to get tested for from my Cambodia adventure. I have his number now and I’m gonna laminate it and copy it to my google drive or something. For real this has been a journey. I’ll know what’s wrong with me in 1 week so I can finally try to get meds for it.
Don’t let all my negativity err you from visiting/living in Korea (unless you got any mental health conditions or things that are uber chronic because then they wont hire you anyway and Korea doesn’t believe in mental health. Probably one of the reasons the suicide rate is so high too 😦 ). There are many complaints about the Korean medical system, lack of confidentiality being one of the big ones. Despite being very advanced in the medical field, draconian cultural ideals make certain things either impossible to fix or very inconvenient to treat. This also makes things very difficult for any LGBTQ Koreans/foreigners in need of testing.
There are also the pro’s to this system though! They do try their best to be thorough and they want to help you, it’s not gonna break bank if you get ill, and you get a lot of individual attention. Knowing Korean would have made this much easier, and the nurse helping me was very kind and stuck by me the whole time. You may also get the chance to experience traditional Chinese medicine, which doctors can prescribe you for (although it is a little pricier). Despite all the obsticals involved, health is taken seriously here!
Long story short: This country is going to kill me.
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