day 141

Today is Wednesday and I will leave for China Friday afternoon. I'll take the train to Seoul early in the morning to do some last minute shopping and errands and then I will meet Yun-kyoung, Brian's Korean friend who has been great helping me obtain my Chinese Visa and making a reservation on the ferry and picking up the ferry ticket itself. All of the legwork for these things had to be done in Seoul which would have made so much more work for me. We will meet so she can give me the visa, my passport which she needed to get the visa, and the ferry ticket.

My plans were almost siderailed. A few days ago I came down with a mildly nasty case of athlete's foot week:swollen left foot (CURSE THE LEFT SIDE OF MY BODY! - deaf left ear, broken left arm while a paper carrier for The Salt Lake Tribune, broken left hand on my mission, sliced the tip off my left middle finger while working at The Pizza Press in Tremonton, athlete's foot on the left, left-lopsided mouth when talking. Where is my cowlick? LEFT SIDE! Where are all my girlfriends? They LEFT me! But I digress...), itchy, painful to walk, and an internal infection in the foot itself on top of it all. Mr. Kim helped me find a determatologist who diagnosed the problem and gave me medication and ointment. It feels much better now so I'm not concerned about walking but the doc said it will take several weeks to completely heal. I've never had this problem before so I can't help wonder if I got it from the high humidity or perhaps I picked it up at a public bath.

For what it's worth, I found it interesting that this dermatologist was a woman. She was totally competent, not that I would expect any less, but I was impressed nonetheless. If you guage how advanced a country is by the opportunities available to both sexes, I'd say Korea is doing pretty well.

Brian's tourist visa to China expires on August 6th so he wanted to come back with me close to that date. The school break ends on the 4th so I took a couple extra days off and I think we actually will return on the 6th. So, if you count the travel time on the ferry, that makes for a 12-day vacation. Not bad, huh? (Actually I think I would trade it all if I could come home for a week and go to the Utah Shakespearean Festival - very sad to be missing it.)

Of course I'm excited to go to China but I think it's more of the mild, calm, assurance of "I know I'm doing something cool and unique" - excitement of adulthood, not the mega-hyper, tremble in the knees, constant surge of adrenaline, "OH MY HECK I THINK I'M GOING TO BURST A VEIN AND DIE THIS VERY MINUTE IF I DON'T GET SOME KIND OF SATISFACTION!" - excitement of childhood.

I miss the excitement of childhood.