Daegu

There’s nothing like being sick in a foreign place to make you miss home. Last week I found myself in the hospital two days in a row. On Monday, I had one student coughing up a storm and sitting right next to me. I told him to cover his mouth several times, but would still catch him spewing germs all over the place—yuck! On Tuesday, I felt like I had something in my throat. By Wednesday, it was full blown, I was pale, coughing, high fever, aching, the whole nine yards. Mr Lee came up to my classroom and said, “Let’s go!” and took me to the hospital. By Thursday, I was even worse. I then had to get a shot in my bum and an even stronger prescription. Mr Lee insisted I eat jook, which is a kind of rice soup that’s popular when you’re sick here, and quite yum! The nurse told me that I just needed to rest, so all I did the rest of the day was sleep. I’m not sure exactly what I had because in this country, you just trust the doctor and take whatever they give you. I also don’t know what medication I took or what was in my shot for the same reason. (Due to our litigious society, such standards of being medicated would, I’m sure, never fly in the USofA!) By week’s end, I felt better, though still not great, and the distance from my bed to my kitchen was getting shorter. But far be it from me to miss out on a good time, thus, Saturday, I went on my trip to the South part of the country, as planned. My stomach is still feeling a bit funky from this illness, whatever it was, though. They keep telling me to eat rice and it will settle my stomach, but so far nothing has worked. (Rice is a cure-all here, to no surprise. I joked with my co-workers, “If I tell you my stomach hurts, you tell me to eat rice. If I tell you my husband left me, you tell me to eat rice. It works for everything!”)

Daegu, a city of 3 million people, is one of the largest in Korea. Amy, carrying a duffle bag and about 20 tangerines due to feeling a bit under the weather, and I went to see what the “countryside” had to offer. Those who live in Seoul have a similar snobbery to New Yorkers who call it “reverse commuting” if you leave the Big Apple to work outside the city (when really, traveling to work is commuting, no matter where you begin or end), and they refer to anywhere else on the peninsula as “country.” Sam had promised us a few good options of places to see and things to do in the rice paddies. We arrived shortly after 9pm on Saturday, got picked up by Lieutenant King at the train station, and went promptly to play a game of trivia against around 80 other people in the military, playing rugby, or just whities with some accent of English. Our night ended around 1am and I have no clue how highly ranked on the trivia scale because Amy and I left the smokiness of the bar for our own walking tour of downtown Daegu. We went to Sam’s and Amy needed her beauty rest, but Sam and I stayed up for several hours competing to see who had a longer-lasting voice or a more interesting story. On Sunday, the three of us went to Camp Walker, one of the nicest Army posts in the country. We ate lunch at the Golf Club, where we watched several people swinging their clubs and practicing their game. It costs as much as a nice house to play golf here, so some of these guys have a deal that allows them to play on the Army post instead of at a club and save a few grand. Then we headed about an hour away to the Haeinsa Temple (pictures already sent—I didn’t send them to many, so if you want them, let me know). There’s really a lot of history at this place! We walked about a kilometer in the falling and fallen snow to get to the main attraction. I didn’t pay a ton of attention because I was freezing cold and a bit nauseous from driving in the mountains, but the tablets that this temple holds (nearly 82,000 of them) took 15 years for monks to carve and supposedly there is not a single mistake to be found anywhere. They’re about 6 feet long by 1 or 2 feet wide. We saw several monks while we were at the temple—we even saw one in the visitor center surfing the web!!

We returned to Daegu after our afternoon excursion and had dinner at one of Sam’s favorite local restaurants. We went back to his apartment and all got ready for bed, since Amy and I were leaving the next morning and Sam had to get up at 5am for PT. And so ended my first mini-vacation outside of Seoul!


Copyright 2005 Olivia R. Reed