It’s official, we made the news. Although we had been told that a girl was showing symptoms but what kind of flu it was hadn’t been confirmed, the news report says different. But this is South Korea where information flow is particularly bad. Someone else just saw it on national TV news that we will be kept in the hotel until the 30th, of course we have no way of knowing if that is true or not.
I need to point out that I have several friends who are living here, and have been living here for years, and have had great experiences. We just happened to draw an unlucky straw with a particularly intense school situation and unexpected medical crisis. Hopefully soon we will get to enjoy living here, it is a pretty fascinating place, which after I’m released from hotel lockdown, I may be able to share with you. 😉
Just to alieve everyone’s stress, as well as ours, here is another medical update from our saga.
A friend of mine e-mailed me from Nashville saying that she has some spots show up on an x-ray. The first thing the doc asked her was if she had ever lived in the Ohio River Valley, which is where J. was born, raised, went to college, and hiked around many caves and mountains in. Apparently there is a fungus that is really common there that is harmless, but does show up as spots on the lungs in x-rays and such.
Here is a brief quote I pulled off the web:
The bases of the lungs are the bottom parts of the lungs. Incidental nodules are very common when CTs are done. Usually, these represent old scars from an asymptomatic infection with Histoplasmosis, a fungus that lives in the soil in the Ohio River Valley. Rarely, they can represent other things, including early lung cancer. Further evaluation of these nodules is based on recommendations that consider each person’s risk of cancer, including the size of the nodule, smoking history, etc. You should discuss this with your doctor.
So it is probably no big deal.
The good thing is that since I’m not allowed to leave, I sent Jim out for coffee and food. he he.
I’m going to do some reading, and avoid going to the sick room until they come and find me.
Update: They (the Korean government, not our school) has now quarantined all of the teachers that were in the training. They have posted guards and we are not allowed to leave the fourth floor of the hotel. They aren’t letting anyone in to see us either. Hence our problem – no one has any food! Luckily J. was able to sneak out and do a Burger King run since it was fast and comes “to go.” No one is going crazy yet, but we’re planning to combine our stocks of snacks and alcohol and have a swine flu party.
Update: There are news crews here and we have been told not to tell them anything, or to mention {our school}. I guess they don’t want parents pulling all their kids out of those schools if it gets around. No one here is even really sick. It’s all just an overreaction to one girl who has flu-like symptoms which could just be a normal flu, or a really bad cold!
So since we’ve been in South Korea, it has been a hellish week of the most intense teacher training I have ever heard of a group of foriegn students having. I won’t go into it now but if {our school} is really hell bent on pushing their curriculum, they need to have a longer training where there is more time to study (and in this case, not get the entire group of teachers really sick from exhaustion.) They have a lesson plan and curriculum they’ve developed that the teachers are required to teach down to the minute. We have a lesson plan that literaly is divided into mintue by minute instructions and if we miss any or deviate, we can be penalized in pay or hours. It’s pretty ridiculous, never mind that their mission is to “encourage creative thinking in the students”, and they really are effectivley doing the opposite.
So we had to get medical exams when we came to the country before we can get Alien Registration Cards. Jim’s chest x-ray showed some spots (light not dark) on his lungs, and they are holding him for testing over the weekend before he can teach to rule out pnemonia, TB, cancer….. Who jumps from pnemonia to cancer? So that was a huge amount of added stress.
Now it’s 4am and they went around to all our doors and woke us up. Apparenlty someone from the training session may have tested positive for H1N1. Now we all have to get up and be tested and fill out a bunch of paperwork. I’m sick. Half the session got sick, and although someone may have brought in a virus, I really don’t think any of us would have gotten nearly as sick as we have if [our hagwan] hadn’t pushed us through jet lag, new air quality, with a crazy training schedule that exhausted and depleted all of us.
So two people were diagnosed with walking pnemonia, two people had to go back for catscans and chest exrays because of spots, and now we all of the swine flu. I’m starting to think this country is a bunch of overreacting, paranoid, hypochondriacs.
But, if they swine flu does show up in South Korea, you’ll know where it came from.
6am Update: Some government officials just came to the hotel and put us all under quarantine. We’re now not allowed to leave the hotel, and have to all stay in seperate rooms to keep from spreading stuff to each other. So that’s that. I’m going back to bed.
Filed under: Travel
Typical Side Street
There isn’t too much to report, but I thought you might like to see some typical street shots. Bright lights, flashing neon, and a Body Shop, Duncan Donuts, and Starbucks on almost every corner. Our hotel is in Gangnam, not exactly a cultural mecca. It is considered an affluent neighborhood, which I’m taking to mean there is not much here except places to shop and spend lots of money. I wanted to take the subway down to some cool old palaces downtown, but that didn’t happen as I had to spend the morning studying the English language, of which I appear to know very little about. I had a discussion with another English instructor yesterday about how we instincutally know how to speak English, but acutally know next to nothing about how to break it down, explain the parts, and teach it.
The pressure is especially on since the company we were hired through has now told us that we have to pass a series of tests to ensure our placement (I’m not sure how they can pull that since we’ve already signed contracts.) They say that between 12 and 20% of folks in a class don’t pass, and that makes their contract null and void. You go home on your own dime.
So my learning Korean is on hold for re-learning the acutal rules of English.
I had lunch at a great little hole in the wall down a side street. No English menu, no one in the restaurant spoke even one word of it, but with a lot of smiling and gesturing, we sat down to a meal of great side dishes and k’ognamulguk – a soup made of pork ribs, glass noodles, and vegetables.
Oh yea, and I swear soda is less sweet. I usually hate soda, but I don’t mind the Coke, they must make it with real sugar as opposed to the corn crap that has completely taken over the American diet.
Filed under: Travel
Jim and I were up at 3am on Thursday to catch a flight in Columbus, OH to Chicago, IL to change airlines in San Francisco to Singapore Air to land at our final destination: Seoul, South Korea.
I love flying over the US. The checkerboarded farmland looks so much more interesting from the sky then from a car. The openess and diversity of the landscape is really obvious and makes for all kinds of speculation on cultural values linked to space, invention, and the free spirit. One of the amazing things about flying over the western part of the country in particular, is how little of the US has actually been developed. We flew for hours without seeing much besides some farms and wide open patches of contrasting mountains and desert.
The Rockies
A town butting up the Sierra Nevadas
After all that wide open space; the crowded coastal city San Francisco:
On the flight, I had been confused when I booked the tickets. It looked like I had to choose a meal, and they all had weird descriptions like no sodium, lowfat, bland …. I picked Hindu, because I know I like Indian food. Well, it turns out I didn’t have to pick anything, it was only for special requests, so our meal comes out, different from everyone else’s around us and Jim is quite suspicious of the meat. I’m pretty sure it was goat.
Hocking Hills in southeastern Ohio is famous for a unique geologic form called recess caves. These aren’t really true caves, as they are not underground, but were formed by softer layers of sand sediment being washed away from the undersides of cliff faces during the period of glacial retreat.
Jim and one of his longtime friends brought a small bunch of us to a private area they discovered and have been coming to for almost ten years. It is not in a public area and has only a small trail blazed by them to an area with a couple of large recess caves tucked away in the woods. There were still remnants of their last fire and some cans they had left (naughty, naughty).
When we got there, what used to be a lush forest for as long as Jim could remember, had been rented to a logging company. Although the caves were still in the woods, the first mile had been clear cut. “Rented” seems an interesting word, as they may be renting the land, the trees themselves don’t come back.
Entrance to our first cave:
Second “cave” split rock:
Our friend Josh, who could start a forest fire with nothing but a rumor and his mouth, led the rest of our party to believe that we were bringing them to this second cave so that Jim could propose to me. We’ve had much different things on our mind what with the intercontinental move, but it made for an entertaining afternoon.
For reasons that aren’t worth going into, Jim and I had to drive 5 1/2 hours from Columbus to Chicago and will have to do it again on Tuesday. Let’s just say it has to do with Korean work-visas and a plethora of not quite accurate information.
I had to do a short interview presumably to prove I’m not insane, a pedophile, or harboring any visible communicable diseases. I was easily pushing ten years older than the other potential English teachers in the room, and capable of forming a complete answer for my goals and reasons for wanting to live in Korea. We interviewed in sets of two and the poor young man I interviewed with was really nervous. His parents are Christian missionaries who have gone to Korea several times, and as he put it “they rescue Korean orphans and bring them back to America.” If I weren’t so tired I could go on for quite a while about the politics and ethics regarding the word “rescue” here. I really couldn’t have been more the opposite of my interviewing counterpart. My interest in Buddhism, anthropology, and teaching, and his history of coming from a family of baby-abducting Jesus fanatics.
The interviewer was a very sweet Korean man who didn’t appear to have much of a sense of humor. Strangely, but not surprisingly, he shook the hand of the young man, but wouldn’t shake my hand at the end of the interview. He thanked me, and made it clear I passed, but I think shaking a woman’s hand was outside of his comfort zone.
It was an entertaining day even if it did involve 11 hours of driving for a half hour worth of interviewing.
The classic midwestern couple travel the world.
Ruby Ramblings 