If Korea Was Like The Oregon Trail, Everyone Would Be Dead From Cholera.

4 of the 6 people in my host family are sick, which means I was prepared to get sick myself, but not this way.

My host father has it the worst, two nights ago he got about half an hour of sleep since he was coughing so violently. Last night I gave him some Tylenol PM that I smuggled out of the union and he was out like a light. I hope he's alive because when I woke up for work this morning, he'd already been asleep for 10 hours. That's a lot for old people, I hear.

Anyway, last night I went to dinner with my family and, in the elevator taking us down to the parking lot, my host dad goes into a coughing fit. I playfully pretend to be disgusted, covering my face and turning away in fear... to which he responds by laughing, walking over, and coughing repeatedly directly in my face. No hand over his mouth, nothing. I'm literally feeling his breath hit me.

Of course, this got the kids excited, so the little runts gather around me and start coughing all over me too. What once was a friendly elevator has been turned into an inescapable disease-filled metal prison.

So no big deal, right? Excepting that I'm completely fucking horrified at first, I shrug it off and go have a great dinner, which they pay for. UNTIL THIS MORNING, because now I'm SICK. Christ on a bike, what the hell did they think was going to happen? Just a playful joke? Let's show him what a fun and easygoing host family we are by spewing germs all over him? Don't these people understand cause and effect?

I'm seriously pretty pissed off, maybe more at Korea than my family. I HATE BEING SICK. Last year in college marked the sickest year of my life: every random cold lasted over two weeks and often mutated into something worse. I started coughing up blood one morning, which was definitely A NEW ONE for me, and it turned out I had pneumonia. Who the mother F gets pneumonia?

Before you judge my family as uncivilized, unsanitary savages, realize that it's not their fault. All Koreans are savages. No, of course they're not really... but I do think that the technology in this country advanced way too quickly for the culture to keep up. They became an economic superpower and technological innovator much too fast. 40 years ago South Korea had a population less than North Korea, now it's the 10th largest economy in the world. Saying that this is a first world country with a third world culture would be exagerrating, but that's kind of the image I'm trying to get across.

This sickness thing is a trite example, but maybe it'll give you some idea. Koreans share everything. It's a culture where food is always taken from the same plate, sauces are shared, soup is spooned straight to the mouth from a communal bowl, everything. I will never understand the rationale for wearing a surgical mask around all day (this is Asia after all, folks) when you're sick and then at meals proceeding to take it off and dip your saliva and mucus covered spoon into the same broth as everyone else.

It's also a culture where food is left out for long periods of time without concern. And this isn't just a matter of "don't worry, it won't spoil", leaving food out is actually a part of many "traditional" recipes. It's always great to walk into the kitchen at midnight when everyone is asleep and getting a whiff like a kick to the face of the ground beef my host mom has left out on the counter to spoil so she can cook it for breakfast in the morning. Yeah, you heard me, rotting meat for breakfast.

With that said, no matter what sort of sickness you come down with, be it food poisoning or a cough, you go to the hospital and they give you a shot and a prescription to take about 10 pills a day. At least a few of these are usually antibiotics, but many of them are herbal supplements that supposedly increase vitality or strength. At first sign of any sickness, everyone around you will suggest going to the hospital.

Ok, this hospital thing is a tangent, but I'm going to run with it. To me, the fact that an entire general population can believe that the common cold, which is a virus, can be cured with antibiotics or an injection of god knows what just screams a profound ignorance of science, medicine, what have you, and an orientation toward mysticism. You trust what's being done to you and you don't question it because it's the way things are done. This is a country of people that sincerely, and I mean SINCERELY, believe that kimchi is the reason why SARS and bird flu didn't spread in Korea.

In short, this country is a hypochondriac's nightmare, and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface by only addressing food. Let's talk about trash and bathrooms some other time. The point for the moment is this: when I get sick, it's because I don't eat enough kimchi, don't drink the hyper-caffeinated, vitamin-infused, ginseng drinks that all my teachers have delivered to them at school, drink too much alcohol (yeah right, compared to college?), and absolutely NOT because I was trapped in a 4' by 4' box with 3 people deliberately guaranteeing their airborne virus entered my body.