Healthy Korea

Well, we're almost at the three month mark and we are enjoying Korea more and more. It was definitely a difficult transition at first, but we are starting to find our rhythm and settle nicely into the pace of life here. This "settling" hasn't always been easy, greatly due to our new environment, and equally as much to the cultural divide. We would like to highlight for you one example of this cultural difference, so that you can get a glimpse of the"Korean mentality." This example mostly highlights some negative aspects of Korean culture (there are many positive ones that we hope be come forth in other posts) and definitely does it share of generalizing, as any reflexion on an entire nation will tend to do. But we still think it paints a relatively good picture, so here it goes!

In short, Koreans seem to continually obsess about their health, and the H1N1 swine flu virus has only amplified this obsession. While swine flu, at least so far, has not shown itself to be more virulent that other forms of flu, Korea has gone berserk in an overblown, illogical, hypocritical, hopeless and at time racist effort to prevent its spread.

When we first arrived in early July, our temperature was taken as soon as we disembarked the plane. I'm not sure what would have happened if we had a fever, but thank God we didn't. We were then technically "quarantined" in our hotel for 4 days, which simply went that we were forced to take our own temperature twice a day, and email it to Chungdahm (our employer). After quarantine we went to training and were forced to wear masks all day while we studied and practiced teaching, and had to sanitize our hands every hour. We also had to take lunch in shifts and could not use the stairs, so as to not infect the other occupants in the building. Now, while we teach we have to sanitize our students' hands three times a class, and also have to take their temperatures.

Oh, and did I mention that every foreigner that came to Korea during the summer had to go through some kind of quarantine, but any Korean who came home after traveling abroad for any period of time was quarantine free!

Also, for being a highly developed country with a health obsession, Korea's general population still has many backwards views on disease prevention. For instance, it is always a gamble whether you will find soap in the bathroom (including at our school), and covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze is definitely an unknown thing here. Further, we've been told by Koreans that you could not possibly catch swine flu in Hawaii because "it is hot there," or in Japan because it is in Asia. The notion here is that foreigners and western nations are more susceptible to this flu. Why?, who knows!

Perhaps the best example of Korea's unique stance on health would have to be "fan death." This episode occurred when a Korean air conditioning company, in a effort to boost sales, paid doctors to go on TV and say that fans kill people because they suck all the air out of a room, thereby slowly suffocating their victims. Some people here believed this, thinking that doctors could not lie to them, and fan sales dropped throughout Korea, or so we've heard. However, this scam was ultimately exposed and thankfully fan sales today are as strong as ever.

We hope this post showed how problems can be addressed over here, and why adapting to this culture has taken both time and a generous serving of patience. Overall, Koreans are a kind and wonderful people, and it is a joy to be around them, especially the younger generations. Just make sure if you come and visit us that you don't have the flu!