Quasi Quarantine

So, here I am, sitting at my apartment listening to Bob Marley's "could you be loved", sipping barely cold beer and eating stale digestive cookies...what better way to spend day six of my quasi quarantine...

Quarantine you ask? I wish I understood myself... but I will do my best to retell this weeks past events and make sense of Korea's convoluted way of thinking...once again.

So, Monday afternoon before our new quarter began, we were read a letter by our head teacher explaining that an new english teacher from the United States entered South Korea with swine flu infecting her fellow trainees. So, these 14 individuals were being held in Seoul in confined rooms for 9 days why they rid themselves of this flu. So what did this mean for us?

Well, (this is where Korean logic comes into play) if they are foreigners and are all potential CDI (my english academy) teachers they must only have the capability of infecting other CDI foreigner teachers...so it would only make sense to shut down all CDI's throughout the country. Brilliant idea! Xenophobia at its best. So now we were going to be subject to daily thermometer checks at 10am and 5pm and we still had to leave our apartment building, pass through the park where many koreans spend their days for a 2 o'clock meeting to get the most up-to-date info on Swine. I don't believe that is a true quarantine. I coughed my way through the park. 

So what does one do to occupy time during a semi-quarantine?...well day 1 consisted of early afternoon drinking at 3pm at the local GSmart (a convenient store where you can buy beer and drink on the patio). I am sure the students walking home from school were thrilled to see their english academy teachers getting bombed at 2pm on a Monday.  Two of my fellow co-workers made a special trip to the sex shop down the road (within our quarantine parameters-how convenient) and some even snuck out for late night McDonald's beyond the marks of our quarantine. 

When we discovered that no other english teachers from surrounding academies were closed we decided this was somewhat of a joke. Once again we realized that the CDI corporation and the unintelligent swines (no pun intended) that run ship were really just a bunch of uninformed idiots who don't comprehend the definition of quarantine.   

I would have been more of a proponent of this quarantine if it felt like the movie 28 days later and I had to stay in my apartment on lockdown with bad Korean television, two bottles of wine and angry Koreans banging at my door ready to kill me. But no, instead, I was unable to travel to Japan this weekend, I got sunburnt, and drank until I couldn't fit my jeans on. Not to mention this semi quarantine semi drunken vacation will have to made up during the coming weekends. So ironically, the next weekends will force me to stay in Cheongju because of this swine flu..so in essence I will be in quarantine for another 5 weeks. Korean logic, how I will never understand you.