da da dun...

And instead of a happy thanksgiving at the American ambassador's residence in Seoul....

I was home sick. Probably with swine flu. (Although, the results have yet to come back on the blood work).

So, the beginning of this week, I'm just anxiously awaiting my reprieve before going home for christmas... Thanksgiving dinner with the F-Crew and chit chatting with the ambassador. The week's going by smoothly. I'm waking up tired, even after 7 or 8 hours of sleep (I now take showers at night in order to avoid the cold, wet hair in the extra cold mornings, so i can now get up at 7 am instead of 645). I tell my co-teacher, but I figure it's just because teaching is taking it's toll. Especially since I wasn't getting Friday off due to a cancellation of a talent show (because of swine flu. Oh, the irony).

So on Wednesday, I start to feel a little something in my throat. No big. I'll get some extra sleep. I wake up on Thursday and feel a little lousy. By lunch time, I get this uncomfortable cold feeling in my lungs. Uh oh. Thursday night, circa the late hours that you never want to be awake in, I'm sweating, tossing and turning, dramatic chills, I know I have a ridiculous fever, and i can't fall asleep. Problem city. After too much uncomfortable, I check the time - 5 am. And desperately wait to send a text to my coteacher to tell her there's no way in hell I was going to make it to the two classes that I agreed to teach before going to seoul.

Luckily, by the time we would normally wake up, my host mom was doing her thing in the kitchen. I told her I was desperately sick. She didn't have a working thermometer, but luckily, I seem to have a pretty good guess. As soon as I make it out of my room, I feel better. My room had turned into a sort of sauna, exacerbating my awful feelings. At any rate, I still knew I was sick. My coteacher took over my classes. My host mom was willing to take me to the hospital/clinic.

My host mom wanted to feed me after the family had left. So breakfast looked like this. White rice, a given. Kimchi, also a given. Steamed spinach with some strange sauce that she served on a previous occasion and told me it was one of her favorites. Didn't like it then. Didn't look good this morning. Then, to top it off, seaweed soup. Normally, seaweed soup is great. Comforting food that's also very nutritious. However, I've decided my host mom has a really high affinity for fish. Fried fish. Weird bivavles. Things with tentacles. Little gnarly looking fish that they grind up into paste. That they put in whole for flavoring soups, etc. This seaweed soup was full of tuna. From a can tuna. So it was just a little "from the sea" for me to eat. To my rescue, she eventually noticed me barely able to eat, and asked if it was too hard. I agreed and thankfully, away went the breakfast... yikes.

So, then off to the clinic. Luckily a short car ride away. Embarrassingly, close (just the other side of my apartment complex). We were confounded by insurance, but I had my host mom raid my wallet looking for a card that might help her make sense. She ended up calling the F-right dr's card we got in orientation. I, obviously, couldn't make any sense of what she tried to say to me afterwards, but I figured it was ok. I was called into the Dr.'s. He didn't speak English so it was time for me to act out my symptoms while he judged me for not speaking Korean. It's amazing that while I clearly don't have a handle on Korean, most people just tend to keep speaking at a normal speed, with no gestures, assuming that my korean appearance outweighs my ability to speak or understand korean. Oh well.

Then a shot/blood test (?) in the butt later, (demeaning), and 10,000W later (so much for being worried about not having insurance!), we were at the pharmacy downstairs. I got a box of tamiflu for five days (one at morning, one at night), and little packages of pills again (5 in each pack, morning, lunch, dinner) all for 44,000W.

Incredible? I think so.

So I'm on the road to recovery, or should be. I'm now just bemoaning missing my seoul food weekend with friends and worrying about having to teach next week.

Today, my body and head don't ache. No chills to speak of. And I just have this annoying cough that's beleaguering me. I also have my host mom spraying dettol, an aerosol disinfectant that smells terrible every other hour all over my room, and then closing the door...

So if i don't die from the flu, maybe i'll die from dettol poisoning. But maybe the next dr's visit would include some more colorful pantomime.

are these the moments that are supposed to keep you smiling?

So it's hard not to like my LOUDEST, most OUT of control class when they say stuff like this to me...

At the end of class today, as an "exit ticket," students had to make one sentence, "I am thankful for..."

Students one-by-one said these to my face...
"I am thankful for your smile"
"I am thankful for you"
"I am thankful for your beauty"

Hard to stay mad at them.

A Korean "Hot issue" (named after a kpop song, but now used as a reference for popular news), that this class also cued me into is "Loser."

Apparently there's a featuring beautiful foreign and Korean women get together to talk about stuff. on TV. That's it. "Chitchat of the beautiful ladies" is the translated title. A girl from Hongik University got on the show and called all short guys, "Losers." This caused an uproar and had one person suing the Korean Broadcasting Station for 10,000,000 won for emotional damage.

So, of course, when I put on a Futurama episode last week, several of the classes laughed hysterically when Fry is looking for a golden bottle cap in a pop can (a la charlie and the chocolate factory looking for the golden ticket), and the bottom of the can says, "You're a loser."

This "hot issue" may even be more dramatic than I thought. I had some of the boys' in this same class honestly bemoaning that they were "losers" because they weren't tall enough. This somewhat shallow classification of all men shorter than average is even more troubling when I see how it's not only recently affected my students, but my adult, female Korean friends here.

My coteachers are looking for husbands, or at least boyfriends. They want someone handsome, with a good job (only doctor or teacher), close location, and tall. While at first glance, these seem like acceptable guidelines. But REQUIREMENTS? Would you really give up the greatest guy because he was only a doctor in residency and not a full-fledged doctor? Or a man who's perfect for you in every way, but he's an inch or two shorter than you? In reality, shouldn't each woman have her own different criteria? I mean, a tall man to a short woman, could still be average male height. How does everyone possibly have the SAME criteria? What sort of brain-washing tv show or crazy homogeneity gene is streamlining all women's criteria for men?

Maybe i'm too biased, since I seem lucky enough to have ended up with a tall, handsome, computer engineer-to-be boyfriend that also treats me right (sorry to brag). But I still wonder if the outsiders' observations of Korea being overly image-obsessed holds some truth. I know, I know. How could it get any worse than America with its scantily clad models on billboards and elementary school children dieting? Maybe I can just reflect, that like so many other aspects of comparing cultures, it's the same, but different.