방학 (School vacation)

I asked a guy stocking shelves at Homeplus (like Walmart) for some of the boxes he had
piled up. He said to take as many as I needed, so I did.

I moved into a new apartment last Thursday, 2/14. They have actual moving companies here in Korea. It's actually kind of funny...to me... but "move houses" in Korean is 이사 ("i-sa"). Coincidentally, the same pronunciation as the Chinese-based numbers 2 (이) and 4 (사). So most of the moving places' phone numbers end in 2424. :) Anyway, I couldn't find one that spoke English, so I decided to try packing my stuff into an International taxi. You can call ahead to reserve them, but there were none available at the time I wanted to go. So I decided to grab my biggest bag of stuff and take it down to the main road (about 3 blocks) and hail one myself, figuring I could at least get started. I took it to my new place -- a 3rd floor walkup!, then the girls, both fluent in Korean, were nice enough to come help me bring my other bags. In all, my stuff filled the taxi. :( Anyway, I was very tired from the move, so it's not much of a surprise that I came down with a norovirus on Saturday. Two of the three girls (my two roommates plus the girl whose room I took) had apparently had it earlier in the week... It started about 7am, with trips to the bathroom every 20-30 minutes, until about noon, when they finally convinced me to go to the clinic down the road. We waited til just after I vomited, then we hurried to the doctor's office, and made it just in time for me to have to run to the bathroom again. The doctor gave me a prescription for an antiemetic and an antidiarrhoeal. I had to alternate the meds every 2 hours (so each medicine was taken every 4 hours) for 36 hours, which made for a long night. I mentioned before how many things in Korea (snacks, etc) are individually packaged, even inside a larger package. Medicines are no exception. When you go to the pharmacy, you walk out with a huge perforated string of pill packs.


For your carrying and dosing convenience.

I'll take some pictures of my new place once it's cleaned up a bit more. I haven't really unpacked because I got an infection from the norovirus. I waited a few days to go to the doctor, hoping it would clear up on its own, but it didn't. The doctor gave me 5 days' worth of antibiotics, and it still didn't go away. So this morning, she sucked the pus out with a big syringe and gave me 3 more days of antibiotics. It feels a lot better, so hopefully that does the trick. Right now, though, I'm pretty glad I bought into the Korean health insurance. It's paid for itself this month already, though hopefully I'm not this sick again, because it's been a miserable school vacation. Though, if this had happened during classes, it would've been worse (making myself get out of bed and sit in class for 4 hours every day). On the way back from the doctors' office this morning, I took some pictures at the big intersection by the subway. It's been the first nice day in a while, temperature-wise.



I live 5 minutes further in the direction of the top left picture.

Obligatory food pictures:


뻥튀기 ("bbeong-twi-gi"), or puffed rice disks. They taste sort of like Rice Krispies
(which is also puffed rice, but a slightly different consistency). You get ~50 disks for ~$3.


Another thing that isn't really in the US: plastic examples of the food on the menu. This is
especially popular outside Japanese restaurants, but I've seen Italian restaurants do it too...
as well as the student cafeteria at SNU, and this hotdog place at Gangnam Station.

It's supposed to be nearly 50 degrees this week, so I'm hoping we can go out and do something. Han River Park is calling me....

edit: The place we went to tonight had some samples outside...


Mmmm, plastic.