Busan

Last Wednesday night we drove to Busan, the second largest city in South Korea. Early Thursday morning I had an appointment to get a medical check - part of the U.S. visa application process. The map I had printed off the internet didn't look much like the real thing so we spent a fair amount of time driving around in the area where we thought the hotel was, trying to find it. Finally we gave up and hailed a taxi. In my broken Korean I explained where we wanted to go and that my husband was going to follow in our car. It turns out the hotel was still quite some distance away. The taxi driver and I had a nice chat - he thought it was very clever of us to use a taxi to find our way to the hotel. Needless to say we would have felt more clever if we had been able to find it using the map!

Since the 11th was our three year anniversary and the 14th was Colin's birthday, we decided to live it up and stay somewhere nice. The Commodore Hotel, (designed by an Australian!) resembles a Korean palace and was a 2 minute walk from the hospital.

This was the view from our hotel window.

Since check-out time wasn't until noon, Colin and Ben hung out at the hotel where they were more comfortable, while I tried my hardest to convince a lady that I didn't need a chicken pox vaccination. I had the chicken pox when I was five. (This bitter event is etched in my memory because I was absent for a whole week from kindergarten and missed the chicks hatching out of the eggs we had been keeping in an incubator in our classroom.) Unfortunately, the only way to prove that I had had the disease involved having a test done and returning in person 1 to 2 weeks later. Since the hospital is about 2 hours from our house I reluctantly submitted to the vaccination.The rest of the medical check consisted of me running all over the hospital having various things checked. Each check (blood pressure, vision, chest x-ray etc.) was performed by a different person in a different room. Luckily the lady who insisted I get the vaccination assigned some poor guy to direct me to the right rooms. I had a moment of panic when the person drawing my blood told me that after the chest x-ray I couldn't breastfeed for three days. (That would have been nice to know in advance.) I had been at the hospital for a couple of hours and pictured Colin at the hotel trying to calm a baby screaming with hunger. Two other doctors reassured me that breastfeed ing was perfectly fine so I went with the majority. And Colin and Ben survived with the help of some yogurt.

We went to a Thai restaurant for a fabulous lunch, and then it was back to the hospital to pick up the chest x-ray. The paperwork was signed by perhaps the only doctor in the hospital I hadn't yet seen, and then it was sealed and stamped.

With the medical check out of the way, we are just waiting for the fingerprint check from the RCMP. Then we can set a date for the visa interview.