An English Teacher Under Quarantine in South Korea

Day Eight: Coda & Credits

Thanks for reading this and thanks for all your support!

This is the part where I get all mushy about the whole mess.  

I’d like to give our sincerest thanks to the medical staff, they really pulled through and turned a tough situation into a great experience.  I think everyone learned a lot in those first few days and once things got settled everyone was on the same team.  Dr. Lee and the others were top rate, always taking time to answer our questions and make us feel at home.  I wish there was more than a signed card and a gift we could have given them, but for now the sanity and joy that they won’t have to deal with us will have to do.

A big thanks also to all the other bloggers out there who covered the story from the outside: Robosyeo, Brian In Jeollanam-do, Kimchi Icecream, and Rate My Hagwon.  You guys got the story out, and I have almost exceeded my gmail quota because of the attention you brought my silly little blog.

And to the bloggers on the inside, Ruby Ramblings, Sparkling Chaos, and anyone else I may have forgotten: great work shaping the story from different perspectives!  You’ve made reading about ourselves exciting!  This blog may die down but I’ll be sure to be following your adventures!

And to the readers: thanks for the emails, tips, jokes, gifts, all the wonderful things you’ve said and done for us over the last eight days.  Having some line of communication with the outside world, a sympathetic ear, and some feedback and encouragement meant having a breath of sanity and fresh air.  It kept us focused on the end game: getting out and getting on with our lives.

And to the U.S. Embassy, thanks for all the hard work setting up communication lines for all the worried friends and family back home, and dealing with the chaos over the first few days.  Once the ball got rolling, you really pulled through and made sure people knew about what was happening.  That really really really assuaged a lot of concern inside.

I feel like this is an Oscar speach…

And of course, our fine institution, who’s probably been hit hardest by this with all the concerned K-moms and all the unwanted attention it’s probably brought: you sent reps on site before anyone else and took care of everyones needs above and beyond what could be expected.  I felt like I had a giant watching my back.  I speak for everyone when I say things would have been a lot harder without your help.

Now, I’m off to go outside and get some fresh air.  It’s nice to have that option.

Day Eight: Hasta La Vista!

After four days of Tamiflu and 8 days under quarantine, we’ve been released or unleashed, depending on who you ask.  No one has shown any symptoms the last few days, and all of our temperatures check out.  Last night was pretty quiet in anticipation of our departure; the proverbial calm before the storm, and when morning came, it was organized chaos!  Vans, cabs, and shuttle buses, all taking each healthy last one of us back out into the free world. 

I think most of us were happy to see the last of each other for the time being.  When I was in college I went on Semester At Sea, and the sentiment was similar…happy to have hung out with you, can’t wait to get away from you.  As the days turn to weeks nostalgia and fond memories will undoubtedly set in and the friendships made inside will probably be stronger than most foreigners make in an entire first year here on the kimchi penninsula.   Heck, it’ll be one of those stories that no one would really believe happened.  "So this one time, at english camp…I got freakin’ quarantined for 8 days!“

As I write this, I’m sitting at my desk, back at my officetel.
As I write this, it’s a beautiful day outside, and I can go out for a walk, a hike, or a jog without triggering a manhunt.
As I write this, our bags are finally being unpacked after more than two weeks here, clothes migrating their way to hangers for a year or more.
As I write this, my suitcase and backpack are being tucked away in closests, not to be used again and lived out of for awhile.
As I write this, it’s good to be free!

Some of us joked that we wouldn’t know what to do with our freedom.  That future english teachers would walk into offictels, finding notes carved into rafters ‘BROOKS WAS HERE’ and a corpse swaying from a noose just like in Shawshank Redemption.  Others laughed about not wanting to leave, that they’d grown accustomed to the routine or the food.  I think I may still wake up at 7am on instinct alone, ready to have my temperature taken, my ear probed, and I’ll shed a tear anytime there’s an announcement on a P.A. system without a cheerful Australian accent behind it.  

Heck, I’m sure some of us  will spot each other on the subways and byways of Korea over time, eyes going wide, waving like two war buddies who spent time in the trench, laughing about our wacky antics, the sheer battle against boredom, the unknown changes and fears that we were all in a sinking ship of germs, pariahs to both the doctors inside and the world outside.  Yeah, we spent time in the trench, but our trench was quarantine and our enemies were germs and boredom.

Now we’re back among you, no different than we were before, healthier too, and all we’ve got are funny stories to tell about it which will undoubtedly grow less interesting as the next crazy thing on the kimchi peninsula comes around.

And if one thing living in Korea has taught me, it’s that you never know what’s next.

Day Seven: More Good News!

We’re getting out sooner than expected! Spirits are high and there’s a lot of laughter in the halls. Fingers crossed no one comes down with full blown pork fever in the next few days.

Day Seven: The Five Stages of Grief & Lando Calrissian

I touched upon this in a forthcoming article, but it should be noted that being in Quarantine is a lot like going through the Five stages of Grief.

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

I think we’re all pretty much at the acceptance stage by now, though Denial was probably the most upbeat time in hindsight.

In other news, I received a nice email from the owner of my school who’s in a tough predicament.  He has to deal with both sick teachers in quarantine and worried (perhaps hysterical) Korean moms who’re scared that we’ll give their children a new form of A/H1N1 along with an english education and valuable critical thinking skills.  So he asked if I’d be willing to remove the photos of us with facemasks from the blog for the time being.

This was a hard decision to make.  

On the one hand, I’m from San Francisco, and people from the Left Coast aren’t usually big on sanitizing or censoring information.  Personally, I feel that photographs tell a huge chunk of the story, and seeing people with facemasks colored or outside tanning on the balcony in good spirits goes a long way in showing how happy or unhappy people are.

Some argue that it’s worrisome to parents to see their childrens teachers in quarantine, knowing how hysterical K-moms can get.  Last year I had students ask me with disbelief how it was that I ate american beef for 28 years of my life without dying from Mad Cow.  This was during the whole Mad Cow Korea scaremongering,  mind you, so I explained that it’s because people were misinformed about Mad Cow and the media was, essentially, lying.  American beef has been on the shelf here for almost a year and I’ve yet to hear of crazy cow claiming a Korean life yet.  

Ultimately, it comes down to education and being an educator, and promoting truth and understanding (be it medical, in the case of the quarantine, or political, in the case of the mad cow scare) and most of all, critical thinking.  

On the other hand, as someone who is saving money to eventually open his own school, I understand our schools predicament.  Here he’s flown us out, housed us in hotels, sent us through training and all of a sudden if things go wrong media wise we’re persona-non-grata to the public.  He’s in a tough situation, none of it his fault (I blame a mexican pig, personally).

Plus, he asked nicely and said it was optional, and if I chose not to remove them it was perfectly fine as well, and that’s the sign of a cool boss if you ask me.

So, I’ve replaced the photos of myself with photos of Lando Calrissian from Star Wars for a little while until I’m not able to be picked out of an infectious police line up.

“I thought I told you to fix the Hyperdrive!!!”

Night Six: Redacted!

So an announcement came over the P.A. saying what day we would get out of quarantine.  Being bored and within a 500 meter distance of my computer, I quickly tossed it up on the blog.  I mean, after a rough day of Rachel Ray, Project Runway, and writing articles for a few different travel mags (maybe one of the best things to have come out of this, besides so much curry tonkastu I now hate the stuff), news of our release was a pretty big deal.

Five minutes later an announcement came on asking us not to put it on our blogs. 

So I’m happy to say there’s an end in sight, and if all works out and we don’t have any sudden surges of A/H1N1 we’ll be mixing and mingling out in the real world soon enough.  I’m sure we’ll have to have a filthy foreigner reunion party at some point in the future when we’re not sick of seeing each other 24/7.

Personally, I’m looking forward to having a shower by myself and not having my temperature taken twice a day.

Day Six: Q & A

So the emails are starting to taper off a little bit, but I’m still getting about 100+ a day, far too many to respond to individually, which I apologize for.  I’m doing my best to send response quickly but they usually build up too quickly to answer back right away.

Q: Why doesn't your blog have comments?

A: I’ve been asked this a lot.  Part of it is because Tumblr is more about micro-blogging than keeping an online journal.  I’m sure I’ve already ticked off the purists by posting so much on it.  

The more important reason is, excuse the vulgarity, but there’s a lot of retards out on the internet.  I don’t want to spend all my time regulating what they say and refereeing trolls bashing dirty foreigners or evil Koreans.  Plus this blog will probably die down a day or two after we’re out of here and the next exciting thing happens, like a Pak Tae Hwan / Lee Hyori sex tape or something and my massive ego couldn’t take the dive in comments so I’d probably end out joining the ex-presidents cliff diving club in sorrow. 

Q: What kind of movies are you watching in there?

A: I watched some of The Onion Movie last night thanks to Chantal Doucet and Jared Brica who sent a ton of DVD’s over.  Also, a lot of TV, most of which really serves as mind numbing time passing entertainment that my brain doesn’t even register in short term memory.  I think I watched some Project Runway: Korea today, but I can’t recall.

Lots of Xbox as well.  My girlfriend’s on the Arcadia level, which she’s having to do over because she forgot to save the game.

Q: Were there any Koreans at this seminar and why aren’t they quarantined as well?

A: There are some Koreans here in quarantine at the Seocho-dong facility as well.  The rest, I believe, are under house quarantine.  

This is a common question actually and one that I’ve gotten at least a half dozen times.  There really doesn’t seem to be any racism or over-all xenophobic intent on the part of the Ministry of Health.  Mainly it was a numbers game: start with the foreigners who all stayed at the same hotel and work outward from there.  Everyone we’ve come into contact with on our one day of freedom romping around the peninsula has more or less been restricted to a home quarantine now, Korean and cracker alike.

Q: How do you smuggle beer or soju in there?  Can I bring you some?

A: Rectally.

Actually we have trained carrier pigeons.  They’re twice the size of the average pigeons but they can carry up to two liters at a time.  We tip them in kimchi.

Honestly, I’ll refrain from answering because we’re not allowed to have alcohol in here for a few reasons.

First, it supposedly raises your body temperature and when you’re under quarantine for the flu a high temperature reading isn’t a good thing to have.

Secondly, it’s a bloody quarantine facility! 

Third, and probably most importantly, drunks can be loud and people seem to like quiet around here.

Personally, I don’t really care for rules, and this quarantine has been pretty half assed to begin with.  Throwing sick people and healthy people together has probably only helped spread it instead of isolated it.  Not changing bed sheets and then playing Switch-the-Room was another bad idea.  Didn’t the settlers do that with the native Americans?  Here, have this infected blanket!

Anyways, I don’t have any beef with people getting sauced, de-stressing, and having some fun as long as they’re quiet.  Heck, have a Roman orgy in the shower room just clean up after it’s over.  I know some people are annoyed at the other people who get a little loud at night and that’s understandable.  However, Korea’s not a quiet place at night to begin with, so I consider it a good introduction anyways.      

They put up some excellent Konglish signs saying bags are subject to search and seizure, so to answer, please don’t bring us some soju or wine.  And if you do, bake it in a cake prison style.  Better yet, buy us some when we get out.  We’ll be the tanned ones with the Whopper & Pizza bellies.

Q: It sounds like they weren’t prepared for the quarantine and are learning as they go.

A: More of a statement than a question, but that’s pretty spot on.  They even said that when we were first brought in.  I think there’s been an internal changing of the guards off and on quite a bit with everything stabilizing the last few days.  Maybe we’ll be a case study one day.  "The Effects of Isolation and Daytime TV on Waegooks.“ 

Plus, we’re all getting a bit of Stockholm syndrome in our generosity towards the Ministry of Health and forgiving their initial fumblings.  The food has been great lately and for the most part people are going: ”They’re really nice to us when they’re not skittering away because we forgot to put our mask on!  Really!  I like it here!“

Day Six: Same S***, Different Day

The public address system has been quiet for the last 48 hours.  I have a feeling most officials are off bowing and crying at Roh’s funeral.  The halls here are quiet with most doors closed.  Visions of infected zombie-swine flu mutations changing their hosts into snouted frothing filthy foreign english teachers behind the closed doors flicker through my head offering something amusing to pass the time.  Reality is rather boring under quarantine.

We spent a few hours laying out in the sun, passing around magazines, laughing at picture perfect Christopher Walken impressions and cursing the construction workers jack hammering away not a hundred meters up from us.  That’s one thing that always amused and irritated me about Korea.  There’s no such thing as noise pollution laws, or if there are they’re enforced about as well as red lights and monogamy around here, which is to say not at all.  Last year we lived next to a construction site that operated seven days a week from 6am to 8pm with the sole intention of seeing how many people it could wake up.  I still wake up early half the time, conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs after a year of hearing excited construction workers chanting their morning pep rally at dawn and doing calisthenics for the days labors.

Swine flu may not have yet claimed my girlfriend or me, but boredom certainly has.  I watched her stare at Rachel Ray on TV this morning, fascinated as that cute spunky cooking host demonstrated how to make meals that kids would like.  Here’s a girl who’s idea of a good time involves horror movies (the grosser the better), World of Warcraft, backpacking around dirt poor countries, and Bret Easton Ellis books and she’s actually fascinated with Rachel Ray.

Maybe the zombie infection has already started to take hold.

Day Six: Good Afternoon!

I slept in until 10:55 this morning.  So deep in fact I didn’t even get out of bed for the routine ‘let me rape your ear canal’ temperature reading.  And it was some of the best sleep I’ve had at all while I’ve been here.

I won’t lie.  I was a little hung over today.  Last night seemed like an appropriate time for people to unwind peacefully and we spent hours and hours talking about everything from the merits and history of communism, american voter activism, how excited we all were about Obama, to me explaining what a libertarian is and realizing I actually didn’t know.  All this was done on the balcony in hushed tones, sitting on blanket and laughing in the darkness.  

Each minute passed was a minute closer to freedom.  Each little bit of laughter took us away from this place, helping us stave off the boredom and routine of life inside.  Think of that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where they have a cold beer on the prison rooftop after a hot day mopping. 

The latest rumor is that we may be out as early as Sunday, but I’ve heard no official confirmation, so I’m going to keep my mind set on Tuesday as the real release date and if it happens on Sunday then well…Christmas came early this year to Korea.

Right now ex-president Roh’s funeral is on TV.  For those of you who don’t know, imagine someone who with the charisma of Bill Clinton.  Now imagine him taking an intentional swan dive off a 60 foot cliff after being investigated for corruption charges that landed members of his family in prison.

If it seems like kind of a big deal it is because as bloody as Korean politics can be, most politicians don’t take headers off rocks in shame.  

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/28/south.korea.roh.funeral/index.html

Night Five: An American who needs help in Seoul

This is totally unrelated to our A/H1N1 quarantine, but since so many wonderful and kind people have been visiting this site recently, sending emails and asking how you could help, please do what you can to help someone who’s in a truly desperate situation far worse than ours.

http://briandeutsch.blogspot.com/2009/05/american-needs-help-in-seoul.html

An except:

You may have seen Matt perform with the Seoul City Improv group, and he was teaching in Korea for three years. In short, he needs an operation on his leg or else he faces amputation or worse, and he will be evicted from Soon Chun Hyang University Hospital unless he can raise the necessary ten million won ($7900 US)*

I don’t know how valid this is, and I can’t go to an ATM to donate to the linked account since I’m in bloody quarantine, but there’s a Facebook support group set up for this poor dude.  We joke and bitch about being locked inside for a week or two, but this guy actually faces losing his leg or worse.  Please consider doing anything you can.

*1 USD = 1,269 won.

Night Five: Two Good Articles on the Korean Herald

Two good articles on the Korean Herald.  The first is by Paul Kerry, who we’ve spoken to a few times over the last few days.  The KH is actually one of the only newspapers to show any real interest in this situation, or at least enough to call up and ask questions and double check facts.

http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2009/05/29/200905290007.asp

The second is an opinion piece by Rob Ouwehand (Roboseyo), who brings up some great points about the potential for xenophobia this situation could cause (and according to many emails I get, has already happened).  I think anyone who’s lived here for any amount of time will tell you that Korea’s a wonderful place but the local sentiment is often that every bad thing happening south of the 38th parallel is the result of dirty, evil, drug using, fire breathing foriegners.  

North Korea detonating nukes?  Obama’s fault.
Ex Presidents taking headers off a hill?  North Koreas Fault, which was Obama’s fault, so he’s a murderer.

Oh, and here’s the awesome article. 

http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2009/05/29/200905290006.asp

Also, apparently my temperature is normal according to the nurse who just ear raped me with a thermometer.  She looked so nervous to be around me she just jammed it in there all the way to the cerebellum.