My coteacher Ms Ryu gave me some homemade kimchi (by her mom, not by her, I think).  I took it home – I got a ride home with Mr Lee, the "vice-vice" principal.  The sun set.  I made some kimchibokkeumbap (kimchi fried rice).  I'm tired – the day was eventless, because all my classes were cancelled, because of a giant test that was taking place.  Such is life working in a Korean school.  I tried to plan out some lessons for the future.  I studied Korean for about 2 hours.  Really.  It might snow tomorrow. 

Last night I went out to dinner with my friend Mr Kim, the engineer from the power plant who I like to go hiking with, although lately I haven't done much hiking, mostly due to the neverending flu thing I have.  We also invited Haewon, my bilingual coteacher from work, who Mr Kim calls Ms An – she teaches an evening class at the power plant, and it was through her that I originally met him.

Because he doesn't get off work until after 6, I went home first and waited.  He called at around 715 and picked me up at my apartment.  It was extremely foggy.  Driving was strange – the regular Korean highway chaos, but in slow motion.  We went to this "middle of nowhere" restaurant (near the turn-off to Bulgapsa along highway 23, a few km south of town) and had a very spicy chicken stew. 

It was a night that would make a good setting for a ghost story.  When trying to find the turn-off to the restaurant, we ended up at some dead-end on someone's farm, with barking dogs and decrepit, broken, ceramic toilet fixtures and a mossy tile roof.  There were trees hovering off the ground through the dismbodying headlamps of the car.  The restaurant had this weird electric rainbow neon flashing outline going, and in the fog it looked like we'd stepped into a zombie video game setting. 

Talking with Mr Kim is different when someone like Haewon is around to provide translation.  It's more communicative, but less direct.  Of course.  It's good to have a reminder – for both of us, I'm sure – that we are not blithering idiots, which is what our respective language skills might lead each of us to believe about the other.

I think one reason I don't always enjoy hanging out with "fellow foreigners," in my current life, is because of the unshakable feeling that I'm "in the closet."  In the closet about what?  In the closet about really liking Korea.  Most of the time, in my experience, groups of foreigners hanging out in Korea devolve into complainfests, during which nothing more is uttered than unending condemnations of some abstract Korean "way of doing things" and gross negative cultural stereotyping.

For me, it's all-too-easy to fall in with this style of talking and thinking, too.  Of course there are things that are frustrating or annoying about my life here.  But my perspective is that American ways of doing things, or Mexican ways of doing things (to name the two cultures which are most familiar to me, outside of the Korean one), are just as annoying or frustrating, and in some instances more so, in their own divergent ways. 

My problem is that as a sort of social chameleon, I just go along with it.  All the complaining is compelling.  But then I regret having done so later.  Negativity is kind of like alcoholism or something – you know it's bad, but social pressure drives you to drink, anyway, and then you regret it later.

When I try to buck this complaining-about-Korea trend – when I try to say something that focuses on the positive or points out the shortcomings of other cultures vis-a-vis the standards they're failing to enunciate – I end up feeling like a gay person in crowd of polite homophobes, or an agnostic at a Florida church meeting:  there's no open vitriol, but there's a sort of "uh oh, what's wrong with this guy?" with lots shaking of heads and snarky asides, as the other foreigners I'm hanging out with come to the realization they're in the company of a closet Koreanophile.

Hanging out with Koreans has drawbacks too – not least is that I tend to miss the ability to have deep, intellectual converstations, due to the generally lacking language proficiency.  But the negativity trap (and I'm openly admitting that I fall far too easily into this trap myself – it's not like I'm trying to blame others for my problem) is a dangerous one, for me.  I need to stay out of it.

I'm sitting, reading, and listening to Genki Sudo.

My friend Mr Kim called me.  He said, "I'm driving Seoul.  You come Yeonggwang Sunday night.  I think?  We stay my house in Seoul.  We hike tomorrow.  We meet Gwangju, 7 8 hour.  Are you OK?"

He was inviting me.  He has a house in Seoul?  Interesting.  I'm off to catch a bus into Gwangju.  Good to be open to spontaneous adventure, at least sometimes.  See you later.

[And by the way, I'm not in any way mocking his English – I'm sure my Korean sounds just as terrible.  He and I do an amazing job communicating with one another, given how bad our skill is in each other's languages.]

Today was my first experience with urgent health care in the context of Korean universal health care.  Or in the context of any kind of universal health care, for that matter – I have only ever gotten sick before in countries and places where universal health care was only a fantasy.   I can only say:  the $10 I paid probably didn't cover much more than the cost of charging me with their fancy computer system.  My national health card has my name as 우이제레드 [u-i-je-re-deu], but the quality of the transliteration didn't seem severelyto affect the quality of my care.

In my three years living here, I've never been to a doctor or hospital, except for a mandatory health check-up / drug test.  I probably should have gone in sooner.  Like on Saturday.  But my distrust of doctors and medical care is well documented, so, as is my wont, I procrastinated, hoping it would "get better on its own."  It did, but only… sorta.

I spent the afternoon in the county hospital, after my department head, the competent and kindly Ms Ryu, took one look at me and said, "why are you at work?"  At the hospital, the good doctor Ryu (no relation to the department head), with his excellent English, put me at ease.  I am eternally indebted to him for rendering what might have been a stressful experience a rather less stressful one.

So, anyway.  Yes, I was diagnosed with climbing down off of a nasty case of severe food poisoning.  Probably.  It sounds about right, although it's hard to figure out what I ate that brought it on.  I'd already realized by Sunday that it wasn't just a bad case of stomach flu – I've had those, and it's not nearly the same level of fun, fun, fun.  The food poisoning, in and of itself, is probably mostly already past.

The explosive, high-pressure vomiting I got to experience over the weekend (and apologies for the no-doubt unwanted detail), however, had some additional unfortunate and undesirable side effects.  Possible "superficial" internal bleeding – hmm… sounds about right.   Ick.  Conjunctival hemorrhage – which is a fancy name for the fact that I vomited so hard, I caused a blood vessel in my eye to burst, giving me a rather vampiric look.  Yuck.  An inguinal hernia – which is to say, I somehow managed literally to heave an intestine right through my abdominal wall.  Squorlk.  Ouch.

I was dehydrated (which I sort of knew) from my weekend with the porcelain goddess, so he put me on a 1 liter IV.  I sat and listened to the elderly people around me in the emergency room confront their various ailments, while their adult children carried on around them.  I watched the drip-drip-drip.  I read the pharmacy prescription he'd given me, which was in Korean, so I didn't really understand much.

After a while, Dr Ryu brought me a cup of instant pumpkin soup from a machine, after he thought the medicine he'd given me had had a chance to quell some of the nausea.  That's one of those smells/moments that will probably be indelibly engraved on my memory now:  instant pumpkin soup = Yeonggwang General Hospital, an IV in my arm.  But not unbearable, for all that.

I'm home now.  My stomach is a little shaky, still.  But I'm going to try to eat something.  Sorry for the disgusting details – such is life, a-blogged-right-here.