2010.07.25 - Acupuncture

Acupuncture

This week has been all about healing. Healing of my busted ankle.

So my colleagues looked up an Oriental clinic near my house and I limped down the street for a few blocks before trying to find the right address. This is not an easy thing in Korea as there are no real street names and no house numbers. And not tooooo many people speak English to help you along! Now, if our Korean skills had any substance it might be a different case but for now we will have to accept our shortcomings. Somehow we managed to find this little clinic on the 2nd floor. The secretary/nurse spoke no English and the doctor - a 79 year old man - knew just enough to understand why we were there. In fact he hardly asked to my condition at all. He took a long time to find his glasses and even longer to read my telephone number from my cell phone (I thought it would be easier to show him instead of telling him), so I was a little worried about him sticking needles in me. But he told us that he is a professor at the university, so how bad could it be ?

Not bad at all. 7 needles for 20 minutes was expected. The smoking foot was not ! After taking the needles out the nurse placed small lit "cigarettes" over where the needles had been extracted. Weird .... Last treatment was the Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator. In my world also called a milking machine with poor electrical grounding !! 12 minutes of this left my foot rather unattractive.

This week I had five treatments and my foot is slowly getting better. Maybe time would have healed it also, but I'll give the acupuncture the benefit of the doubt. Here two weeks after twisting my ankle I can now walk almost without a limp although the ankle is still a little swollen. The worst part is going sown stairs which is a bummer when I have to get around on the ship.

Yesterday we met up with Ulrik and Karine at Haeundae beach for dinner and pre-dinner drinks. They have been hit hard by illness lately, so I think they were happy to get out a bit ! It's not easy with three kids. It was funny how the kids caught the attention of the Koreans. Especially the waiters who did a great job at keeping watch, playing and hugging! Juliet was especially keen on one of the girls whom she hugged whenever she got the chance.

Haundae beach is madness for a month or two during summer. I think the photos speak for themselves. It has to be mentioned that they don't allow you to swim at all - if you get deeper than your hip the beach police will get after you! Very Korea....

Today we drove around town trying to find a farewell gift for my colleague who will leave us at the end of the month. We had decided on a cycling jersey so we went on the lookout for a bike shop. Again we ran into the address problem. Luckily our GPS navigator accepts phone numbers as input and this works about half of the time. So out of the two phone numbers I could find on the internet, we should be OK. First one was un-findable but we found the second one all the way across town. Gotta find a shop closer to home for when I get back on the bike ....