Health check and Banwoldang

Daegu, , ,

Last week was included a visit to a hospital, not because I was ill or injured but because part of moving to a new country (or at least Korea) is a health-check. And Korea does not trust foreign doctors, or at least not doctors from SA, so I had to have the health check here. For the record, as a result of a largely serious-injury and -illness free time so far, I am not at all familiar with hospitals or medical tests on any continent.

There has also been a bit of a drama recently about this medical check. It seems some teachers object rather strongly to, particularly, the drug and HIV tests. The tests are seen as discriminatory against foreigners (and particularly foreign teachers because other visa types apparently don’t have the same regulations). There is also the concern that testing may result in some serious stigma and ostracism issues because HIV carries huge social stigma here and confidentiality is apparently not very confidential. I’m not really sure where I stand on the issue philosophically, but personally I have no objection to the tests.

So, off I went on Tuesday to the hospital. My boss drove me – thank heavens – and filled out the forms (which were all completely unintelligible to me – because they were in Korean, not because they were in medical-eze, although for all I know they were that too). I was then handed a stack of forms and a piece of paper telling me where to go and directed to the second floor as me boss went off back to work. On the second floor, I found a passage leading to the right and walked tentatively along. Eventually a passing nurse took pity on me. My Korean being non-existent, I was unable to tell her where I needed to be. It turns out this is the wisdom of the piece of paper. She read it and pointed to the entrance to the ‘migrant workers’ clinic’.

The people there didn’t speak English either but they welcomed me in and walked me through various standard tests with well-practised hand gestures obviously developed over many, many such encounters. Once the ears, eyes, height, weight, etc. tests were done, one of the nurses walked me into the passage and handed me over to a man who – wonder of wonders – spoke limited English (no condescention intended – I realise I’m in their country). He took me to the next place, explained that I needed a chest x-ray and pointed towards a curtain, having explained as we walked that I would need to pop in the following day to get my results. He then went off, leaving me sharing a somewhat bemused look with the lady at the desk. She gestured towards the curtain, where discovered instructions (in English). I was relieved.

After the X-ray, I was directed (amazing what can be communicated without words) up a little side-passage, where I found a lab technician, who also spoke little English but did have the words for blood test and urine test. This bit went off fine. Except for one thing. When I watched her take a needle out of a bundle of other needles to draw blood, I found myself wondering if the needle was clean. It’s strange and unexpected, particularly when I know these tests are intended to check for foreign things in the blood. Suddenly scattered, random bits of HIV-prevention knowledge surfaced and I forgot that I was in a sophisticated, mostly modern country and worried about whether they were using clean needles. I have no idea where the thought came from. Remnants of a deep-seated and hotly denied xenophobia? Or racism? A little odd.

The medical check felt like forever but really only took an hour and then I headed back to the ground floor. At this point, I would like to wander off on a tangent and ask: do we, in South Africa, start counting floors from zero or from 1? Is there some sort of standard that is country-specific or some international norm? In my head, when I think of F1 (floor 1), I expect to be on the level above ground level, the first floor. If I want to leave a building, I take the lift (elevator) down to ‘0’. But I nearly got completely lost the other day because I tried to find something on the first floor which was a level below where I was looking. Is the norm actually to start counting at 1 and I’ve been lost all these years?

Back on the same level as the pavement  (sidewalk) outside, I headed out of the hospital with a piece of paper saying that I could collect the results the following day after 11:30am and took a deep breathe of  fresh air. Or at least a deep breathe of air that is as fresh as is possible on the pavement between a row of skyscrapers and a 6-lane major road. The area where the hospital is, is near downtown – a by-now almost mystical place I keep meaning to explore but which I have only seen (once) in the middle of the night. I considered crossing the road to explore right there and then, until I noticed that there didn’t appear to be any of the usual pedestrian crossings and pedestrian robots (traffic lights).

My boss, before he left, had said that I could take a subway or bus back (and then home) but suggested I take a bus. The problem  is that the bus system, wonderfully regular and widespread once you figure it out, is not easy to fathom up until that point. This tends to result in me standing around trying to figure out if one of the bus numbers is familiar. On this occasion, I decided I’d have enough new experiences for one day and looked around for the subway entrance.

This is when I discovered that the subway is not just a subway. There were three or four entrances nearby. Most subway stops, have two entrances. This one had many. I picked one and headed down… into a whole new world. Below the road and the hospital and the middle downtown area is an underground mall. Passages meander right and left, lined with little shops selling everything from CDs and cellphones to pastries and underwear. A world of artificial light, crowds, noise and consumerism. It took me so much by surprise initially that I forgot to take note of the entrance number I’d come in by.

I wandered up and down between the shops until I found a sign saying ‘tracks’. I am forever grateful to whatever benevolent Korean decided that the subway signs should be in both English and Korean. I would spend an awful lot of time being lost otherwise. The way Daegu subway works is that you wander downwards, following the signs that say ‘tracks’, until you reach a row of turnstiles, where you put your travel card on the reader and pass through. For the record, the barriers and turnstiles would not stop even the most desultory attempts by criminals to jump them, which of course isn’t a problem here. Also, the turnstiles aren’t – they’re like a low gate-ways with two little gates (about 20cm square at waist height) that snap out if you try and go through without paying. Once you’re through the turnstiles, you follow the signs to different  platforms depending on the direction in which you’re heading . It turns out that this station – Banwoldang – is the intersection point for the two subway lines. Despite having a population of 2.4 million people, Daegu isn’t all that big, so there are only 2 subway lines. One runs roughly East-West and the other (very) roughly North-South. The two cross at Banwoldang station. This means increased danger of getting incredibly lost. If you follow the different coloured arrows on the floor, however, you should find your platform. It’s a little like following breadcrumbs, especially if you’re not exactly sure what the name of the direction you’re going in is. The directions are indicated based on the name of the station at the end of the line (in that direction). I’m getting better and now know that the line I usually take – the green or number 2 line – runs between Sawol and Manyung, so I just have to figure out each time which way I’m going. Luckily, there are maps of the subway lines, with English, on the walls.

The following day I rushed down there during lunch to go and pick up my results from the hospital. Of course, as a result of not paying attention, I found myself, now with limited time, frantically wandering around the underground mall trying to figure out which exit to take. Eventually I took exit number 5 at random and popped up on a corner I didn’t recognise at all, so I rushed back down and – hoping that my sense of direction hadn’t abandoned me completely – attempted to cross under the road and come up on the other side. This time things looked a little more familiar but I was still not in quite the right place. The underground mall area and subway are not just under a road, they’re under a major, large intersection (one road is 6 lanes, the other I think 5) and I was now on the right side of the main road, but on the wrong side of the smaller road that crosses it. I went back down and walked further along until I came to exits 22 and 23 – at which point, of course, I remembered that the one I’d come down was 22 – and headed upwards. This time I was in the right place and happily collected the precious piece of paper I needed to hand in at the immigration office. I even got back to work with time to spare before my next class.

The sequel to all this is that, when I saw my boss later in the day, he was taken aback that I’d gone off on my own and fetched the results. I didn’t even realise that there was an option. Go figure. Oh, well, no harm in him thinking I’m competent. I also noticed this morning that one of the buses that stops at my home bus stop (where I leave from to go to school) also goes to the downtown/hospital area, so if I need to go to the hospital for any reason again, I won’t need to risk getting lost in the still rather terrifying underground mall at Banwoldang.

Pass the Dongdongju…

Daegu, , , , ,

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking things slow and settling into work and my flat without really meeting many people or going out much. I imagine I’ll probably end up settling into a routine of not going out all that much anyway – partly because I will be working evenings (just as soon as the summer break is over) and partly because I’m a little older and a little less enamoured with partying than some others. But it’s always good to try something new and spend the occasional evening out. So on Friday night I went out with a group of other foreign English teachers. I was invited by one of the teachers at another branch of our company but the people in the group teach at a variety of schools.

Because most of them have evening classes, the night started quite late. The teacher I was joining gave me directions and I headed off to find her. This involved taking a bus (a different bus to the one I normally take!) and getting off as soon as I saw a building called ‘Park the Star’ (yes, I have that right – a gallery, maybe?). The thing about taking buses in a place where the bus system is described as ‘likely to bewilder foreigners’ in the guide book, and were nothing is in English, is that it can be a little tricky figuring out where to get off the first time you go to a new place. We work by landmarks to try and figure out when to ‘ding the bell’ on the bus so that the driver will let you off (at the next stop, in case you were thinking that buses here might be like taxis in SA that just stop anywhere). After a bit of miscommunication and getting slightly lost once off the bus, we managed to meet up and headed for a place where these foreigners apparently gather. This place is near to the branch of the school where she works, so at least some of the group I was with spend quite a lot of time at this place. I have no idea what it’s called in Korean but they call it ‘the hut’. It has something of a rustic theme with lots of wood and grass mats (on the walls and dividing up the booths). Apparently it used to be something between a brothel and a restaurant specifically designed for men to take their mistresses. Very odd. These days, it’s just a bar – albeit one with a fascinating design and no windows. I didn’t have my camera but I will definitely go back and take pics sometime soon. It’s also a fairly wealthy area, with a variety of hotels catering to Koreans and foreigners. I am told the German hotel and micro-brewery is great. Will have to check it out.

Friday night, however, we stayed at ‘The Hut’. So this is where I tasted, for the first time since getting here, some traditionally Korean drinks. The first of these is dongdongju (I think) – a kind of rice wine. It’s actually lovely. Refreshing and a little sweet-sour. The taste is not similar except for sweet-sourness but it reminds me a bit of the taste of sherbet. It’s milky white (although it isn’t made with milk) and is served in a large wooden bowl, with ice floating in it, and with a wooden ladle. The person pouring (typically the youngest woman at the table I’m told) then ladles the drink into a smaller, drinking bowl for each person, using both her hands to do so. Touching your right arm with your left hand while you take or give something seems to be quite common here – something like the Xhosa polite handshake – so that makes sense. Everyone then sips the wine from his/her own little bowl. And goes back for more. I’m not normally that much of a fan of rice, but I think I’ve found a form of rice I like. The alcohol content of this is apparently similar to ordinary (grape) wine, although this is hearsay as there were obviously no bottle labels to check.

The other local alcohol of the evening was Soju. Several people were a little shocked to learn that after 3 weeks in the country I still hadn’t tasted Soju – as if arrival in Korea should somehow translate immediately into walking into a bar and demanding Soju, which is a bit odd, but who am I to judge. This alcohol is a little different. It is apparently made of mostly rice (with echoes of the ‘mostly apples’ from Pratchett’s – Nanny Ogg’s – Scumble). It’s a little like vodka but with less of a burn as it goes down your throat. Apparently it’s very good when mixed with Fanta, a mixture I’m sure I’ll end up trying at some point but we were drinking it as shots on Friday (although not many for me because I was teaching the next day).

While here (apart from Friday) I have also come across some foreign (non-Korean) wine and a wide variety of (somewhat bizarre) beers. So far I’ve tried two wines – one Australian (Colombard/Chenin/Verdan) that was lovely and a Chilean Chardonnay that is fine but a bit fruitier and sweeter than I’m used to and rather strongly wooded. I haven’t seen any South African wines, not even at the Wine Bar that says it has South African wines on the sign outside. That said, I haven’t been there with anyone who actually speaks Korean and “I’m looking for a nice South African Pinotage” is rather complicated in sign language.

Most of the time, I end up drinking coffee. Or good old Coke – which thankfully tastes the same here as at home. The coffee comes in cans or paper cups with foil and plastic lids, and straws, and is bought cold from the local store or supermarket. It really is everywhere. It also beats, hands down, the instant coffee I have managed to find so far. A few years back one of the coffee manufacturers in SA started marketing a pre-mix of coffee and cremora. I never liked it, but at least that had coffee which tasted a little of coffee. Unlike this stuff, which seems rather insipid and is probably composed largely of chicory plus a cremora-type creamer. Given that I don’t have a kettle anyway, it’s not too much of a hardship to stick to store-bought coffee-in-a-can. Of course, I’d recently started drinking my coffee black before I left. I’m over that now – it’s almost impossible to figure out whether the coffee you’re buying has milk or not (Espresso? With milk. Latte? Oh, no milk…). I’ve tried a variety of these and have now found one I really like – a lovely, medium-strength mocha-java with milk. Unfortunately – perhaps inevitably – it’s the one kind that isn’t available everywhere. So the search for an easily available coffee to drink every morning continues. Who knew that the trip to Asia would involve a daily search for good coffee? Perhaps a regular hazelnut latte will have to fill the gap. There are also many coffee shops but they have the dual problem of time-constraints and lack of English-language menus.

On my more adventurous – or simply thirsty – days, I’ve also tried a few slightly more unusual things. Like the bean tea that was handed to me, on my third or fourth day here, when I was working at an intensive-English camp. These camps – ironically – are staffed by people who don’t really speak English, so conversation was minimal, I was thirsty and I was a little nervous of appearing rude to the people who were paying me a fair amount of money to teach for 3 (which ended up being 5) hours. So, when the woman in charge (a flittery little woman in frilly dress, high heels and lots of make-up) handed me a ‘Black Bean Thera-Tea’, I held my tongue and drank it. I’m not a tea fan, so I wasn’t thrilled anyway and, honestly, it doesn’t taste particularly good. It tastes like beans, unsurprisingly I suppose, and has the most amazing ability to completely dry out your mouth while you’re drinking it. Eventually, I slipped the second one into my handbag and hoped no-one would notice.

I’ve also tried Cherry Coke (aargh!), organic grape juice (which was worryingly sludgy) and chocolate milk in a mini-milk-carton. At work I drink lots of water – from the water fountain in the reception area. The tap water here is apparently not good to drink, although I’ve had no problems with using it for cooking and washing fruit, but I’m not feeling up to stomach problems, so for the moment I’ll stick to bottled. In the evenings I occasionally pick up a beer (which seems to be for sale everywhere and everywhen). The beer has produced some of the more fascinating translated-label amusement. The one I’ve settled on as my favourite (read least chemical and insipid), is Hite Beer, which claims to be ‘Clean, Crisp and Fresh’ with ‘FTK system – Fresh Taste Keeping system’. Cass Lemon’s slogan is ‘Sound of Vitality’ (yes, lemon beer. No, I don’t know why – either the lemon or the slogan). The most fascinating so far, however, has to be the Stylish Beer (yes, seriously). This is ‘premium beer with fibre’ and is ‘smooth and light premium beer exclusively designed for well-being of young generation’.

Hard to believe it’s four weeks tomorrow. For now, I’m sipping a glass of chilled, Chilean Chardonnay to celebrate the fact, and considering when the next fascinating, strange experience of life in Korea will magically appear.

Missing the sky

Daegu, , ,

The warrior’s now a worker and his war is underground
With cordite in the darkness he milks the bleeding veins of gold
When the smoking rock-face murmurs, he always thinks of you
African sky blue
Johnny Clegg and Savuka, African Sky Blue

Daegu is a city of sky-scrapers. Sometimes when I’m moving around in buses and on foot, I can forget this and feel almost as if it is normal for buildings to tower over roads and buildings, but it’s always there at the back of my mind. I find all cities a little claustrophobic. I once spent a day in New York and my lasting impression of it is that there are too many buildings and not enough open spaces. And I don’t mean little parks in between the buildings. I know that lots of cities have created parks and planted trees and done everything they can to ‘green’ their cities. But a little bit of green is not the same as open spaces. This city is surrounded by tree-covered hills (literally surrounded – it feels like there are dozens of them). It’s hard to explain to someone from a completely different world that the green is sometimes as claustrophobic as the huge buildings.

Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to what you’re used to. The area where I’ve been living in South Africa is a forestry area, with miles of green forested hills and some natural forests of the Tsitsikamma variety. But these exist in between the wind-swept grassland mountain slopes and open hills dotted with acacias and the occasional aloe. And all the places I have travelled to in South Africa, as well as the several other places I have lived, have been surrounded by open space. Farmlands and game parks and open veld stretching to the horizon, or the immenseness of the open sea.

One of the other reasons that all South African spaces seem more open is probably because our cities tend to meander off into the distance instead of being compact (modern?) cities. We seem to build out instead of up. I suppose because a shortage of space is not generally a constraint. Plus, of course, ground that is not hugely stable in places like Joburg make building up a little risky. Here they build up. In order to house the apartments and offices of the millions who live in the small-ish city where I am, massive apartment blocks grow towards the heavens. When I first landed in Daegu, I was struck by the fact that, from the air, the sky scrapers looked like clusters of some semi-wild thing growing straight upwards from the ground. From the ground, from the streets and the little parks, they seem like monstrous hunks of concrete towering precariously above you (though the precariousness is probably just a matter of perspective). In a city surrounded by mountains, the sight of a green hill is actually fairly rare; a sweet surprise when you round a bend or find yourself high enough up to see them, but generally hidden by yet another neon-lit sky-scraper. Even from my fifth-floor classroom window, most of the hills are obscured by much taller buildings.

And then there is the rain. A lot of South Africa is way closer to desert than lush green paradise. I love the summer thunderstorms of the Highveld but they don’t deliver all that much rain. Even Cape Town, except when it’s flooding, only gets a moderate amount of rain compared to a lot of other places in the world. I got quite used to regular rain in Cape Town Winters. It didn’t thrill me then, either. This is a lot like that – except that it’s always hot. And there seems to be even more of it. I don’t think there has been a dry day since I arrived. I now don’t ever leave the house without an umbrella and most days I wake up to and/or go to sleep to the sound of rain. Today I was glad that the rain woke me because I had forgotten to set my alarm. But at some point enough feels like enough. You start to wonder how there can possibly be so much water in the sky (yes, I know scientifically that is a silly statement, but that’s how it feels). Particularly in the mornings when I’m walking to the bus stop  in the rain (almost without fail). And everything is always a tiny bit damp. Sometimes, when the rain is light, it doesn’t even seem worth the effort of opening an umbrella – and you know that it’s hot enough that the few drops of rain will dry off quickly. Even if I do get odd looks. But often it pours for hours at a time. This also means that there are always clouds. This isn’t the kind of rain that builds, then pours, then clears. Even on the rare occasions when I catch a glimpse of the sky (behind the dark green mountains and the dark grey sky-scrapers), it is grey and full of clouds and rain.

A friend has posted some stunning pics of a trip he took to Lesotho, complete with wonderful wide open sky. Looking at them this afternoon, I was filled with the first surges of homesickness – a deep longing for wide open spaces and endless blue skies. There is something amazing about the emptiness of the African sky – resting a million miles above an African Winter landscape, pale and dry and stretching forever to the horizon. Dana Synman writes in his book, On the Back Roads, “…Maybe it’s because today most of us are confined to life in the cooped-up spaces of the cities. It’s great to know there’s open space out there where you can just drive, and drive, and drive. Open spaces allow you to dream dreams of freedom.” A colleague and I were talking today about how the Koreans seem to live very ordered, confined lives. It’s an almost perfect foil to the freedom of open spaces. The symbol of that freedom for me will always be the sky – those wide open skies that go on forever and forever, with a depth and an intensity that seems to last until the end of time. It makes me think of the Voortrekkers, taking off across the mountains, into the distance – heading out to forever and a future that was uncertain but free. I wonder if they sensed the amazing weight of that empty sky.

Before this bout of longing for African skies, I had lunch today (with same colleague) at a place called Outback. Apparently there is some sense of the value of wide open spaces here, too, even if the name is (as I imagine it is) intended to appeal mostly to the minds (and wallets) of foreigners. Whatever their gimmick, I was not going to complain about being in a restaurant where I could order a steak – a good, solid, rich, medium-rare steak. Meat makes me happy, so it’s good to know that there are places to get a good steak in town. It may not happen often, but it’s good to know there is the option.

We also drove past a group of about 20 people sitting on the pavement outside a building, each on a square of plastic with some kind of plastic topped thing that looked a little like a plastic fan. I was a little confused. Then we saw them all start tapping their plastic things on the ground in unison and chanting. Apparently they were having some kind of protest. I always have a sense of something wrong when I see people from other countries protesting. I had the same feeling watching protests in the UK on TV earlier this year. I feel like they’re not doing it right. I tried to explain it to my colleague, how I feel that they’re not taking it seriously – they’re just not doing it right. In South Africa, a protest involves people who feel very strongly about their issue and will make that very clear with loud, un-ignorable singing and dancing. My colleague pointed out that if he was in charge he probably wouldn’t take it too seriously if people were singing and dancing in protest. Perhaps I didn’t explain it right. I remember watching a BBC report on protests somewhere (Indonesia?) earlier this year and thinking that the reporter was missing the point when he said that all seemed calm because people were singing and dancing. Perhaps it is because I know only too well (based on my country’s history) that a singing, dancing crowd is fully capable of turning to violence if their voices are not heard, but watching a crowd toyi-toyi, it feels like they’re taking it seriously. Or maybe it is the unique strangeness of South Africa (Southern Africa?) that singing and dancing are not just frivolous recreational pastimes, they’re part of everything – a serious, meaningful part of every serious, meaningful thing.

A serious part of every aspect of my life, too, no matter how far away I am. Like the African performances at the Mandela Day concert in New York, which I loved. Particularly Chris Chameleon and Baaba Maal. And watching Jesse Clegg and Freshly Ground perform Asimbonanga, which felt a little bit (at least from my slightly nostalgic perspective) like a new generation of South African musicians taking the torch. The music I can take with me – even if most people here will never quite understand it. Some days I wish I could do the same with the African sky.