For extra Korean Airport Fun, Check Box.

In the morning, I slept as late as I could, played on the internet, and packed everything up for Korea. Around 11 I checked out, grabbed some lunch, and then hopped in the MTR for the long ride out to the airport. The people at the Dragonair office were very helpful, and I remembered to put labels on my check bag this time,

After an uneventful but pleasant flight to Korea, I debarked at Busan airport. After expecting a really wild entry into Hong Kong, and having it be completely normal, the approach procedure into Busan was truly wild: a 180 degree turn at maybe 200 feet above gruound level at the end of the runway. Ah well.

I had a bit of fun in the Busan airport though. Due to the swine influenza scare currently sweeping Asia (which they take much more seriously and differently than we do in the states) there is a quarantine procedure for each country. In Korea, this procedure is a form you fill out on the aircraft and give to a health quarantine officer before going to talk to the immigrations control officer.

So I filled out the form (where have you been? where are you staying? etc.) and it included a space at the bottom with a field saying "have you experienced any of the following symptoms in the past 7 days?"

The symptoms were Fever, Severe cough, (Rhynosomething?) (Or Nasal Congestion), and something else.

Well, in the past 7 days I've had (and fought off) a defcon 4 sinus infection. So I figured, sure, I've had one of these. They wouldn't put the boxes there to be checked unless they expected somebody to check them, right? They probably just use it to help figure out which people they need to be more cautious with.

Wrong.

So I go up to the quarantine guy, and he takes my form and glances over it. I assume he's reading it, since, y'know, he's holding it and looking at it. He takes my temperature using a skin sensor on the side of my neck. After a moment, and a reassuring chirp from the little thermometer, he nods, hands me a flier on the symptoms of influenza, and waves me through.

So I walk on to the immigration desk and hand her my passport and visit request form.

She nods and looks through my passport, carefully stamping it with visit information.

She's handing me back my passport when the fellow from the health desk comes running across the little open space between the two lines of control desks, waving his hands in the air quasi-hysterically. "Wait wait wait sir!"

I look up at him. "Yes?"

"Ah, sir. You checked box?"

As if maybe I had not meant to check it? I don't know. I raise my eyebrows. "Yes."

"Ahh." There is some hand wringing, and with very concerned body language he implores me back to the quarantine control desk. "You come back to desk!"

"Ok." I say with a bemused grin. I've got hours to reach my hostel, no plans for the evening. I had checked the box, after all.

So back we went to the quarantine desk area. He grabbed an associate and they conferred hurriedly in Korean. I put my hands in my pockets.

He came back to me. "You checked the box?"

"Yes. I was just in Hong Kong, and the air there is so polluted, it made my nose sick." I said, trying to simplify sinus infection as much as possible for the benefits of the obvious language barrier, and wanting to avoid using any word that sounded like "flu" "swine" or "plague o' death".

"Ok." It didn't look ok at all. His eyes were still large with concern. "I take your temperature again!"

"Sure." I said.

He stuck a slightly more accurate thermometer in my left ear this time, and the chirp came back just as reassuring as last time.

I decided it would not be wise to try to explain that my temperature runs about 1 Fahrenheit degree below normal, goodness only knows what they would have done then.

He looked at the thermometer. Looked at me. I looked at him, and blinked.

"I take your temperature once more!" He said, as if it was entirely possible that in the 5 seconds we'd been staring at each other, my temperature had risen one degree per second and I was now a walking patient zero for Influenza for the entire nation of Korea.

This time, he uses my right ear. Same chirp.

He looks at me. I look at him.

Suddenly, a thought occurs to him. You can tell it's ground-breaking stuff by his expression. "You feel o.k. now?" he asks.

I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd lied and said no. Instead I simply nodded and shrugged. "Sure. I feel fine now."

"Oh." He pauses, presses another brochure on the symptoms of influenza into my hands, on top of the identical one he gave me three minutes ago. "Ok. You can go."

I say thank you, and head back to the visit counter. The girl reprocesses my visit request with a smile, and I'm off to the Zen Hostel Busan.

Zen Hostel Busan is essentially the large, beautiful decorated and spotlessly clean apartment of one June Park. He's not there when I arrive, but he's left me a key and a note, and the other current guests (two Brits and three Americans) let me in and make me feel at home.

When June does arrive, he turns out to be a ponytailed Busan native and all-around laid-back guy. We chat briefly and then a movie is started on the 40+ inch television in the common room. June goes off to do his thing. The movie is pirated direct from the internet, and played off of June's little 'guest computer' using VLC. There is some confusion about subtitles, since the VLC interface is all Korean, and the guys manage to figure it out with June's help. At first, he gives us Korean subtitles with a slight grin, and there is a awkward pause that I found quite funny as the guys try to figure out how to ask for English ones.

The movie is a Korean comedy, slow and methodical, made up of awkward social interactions surrounding a fellow who takes to binge drinking after breaking up with his girlfriend. It's not really funny, per se, for about 95% of the time it's running, but the couple of major punch lines that the movie builds--very slowly--towards, are hysterical, and it's interesting to see what one culture counts as funny and another culture counts as lame.

When it is over, a couple of the guys start another Korean film, a sortof modern art house thriller called Old Boy. It's actually really good, but I have to be up early so I crash halfway through. I'm going to look it up when I get back to the states though. I want to know how it ends.

Tomorrow, I'm meeting Mac at Busan station, downtown, and we're going to a temple.