::A Geek in Korea::

After the third day of Chinese food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (with the exception of a trip to a North Korean restaurant), I was getting pretty tired of the Chinese cuisine. I had the same thing for nearly every meal, and every item on every table was covered in lard. Even the peanuts they served as a side dish were covered in oil. Jasmine tea helps cut down oil in a body’s system, but when the oil levels are hundreds of times higher than they should be, something is going to give. If you have any chance to eat something not drenched in oil, you double up on it.

We had breakfast on the third day of the trip as usual in the hotel buffet restaurant. We took extra yogurt packs and two boiled eggs to our table as we had in the previous days, intending to supplement our oily diet with something a little healthier. We didn’t have the chance to choose our restaurants because the tour, and we never had a chance to go shopping for something we might want.

I went out to go to our room to pick up something I had forgotten, and when I returned to the restaurant, I met my wife as she was heading to the bathroom. She passed me her bag, and we had a chat about where we were going to meet up after she got out of the restroom. I was going to wait outside the restaurant for her to show up.

No sooner had I stepped out of the restaurant than a security guard/waiter fellow came up to me and told me to return the yogurt I had "stolen". There was no sign saying anything about taking food out of the buffet. We had done this the previous two days without incident, but this man wanted to search my bag for a cup of yogurt. I looked at him like he was insane, then I remembered that if I was in charge of a buffet’s security, embarrassing a foreigner would probably be the highlight of my day. I asked him if he wanted the yogurt personally, or if I should return it to the tray I got it from. He said I had to go back to the tray, aka, "The long walk of shame". It’s not like this guy had a gun or something. He was a waiter that could speak enough English to tell me to put something back. I wasn’t intimidated, and sort of wondered how important a yogurt was to someone that was willing to cause an confrontational incident about it. He came off very hostile about something so small. However, I was in China, so I did what he asked.

I returned the yogurt and walked out to meet my wife. We still had the extra hard boiled eggs in her bag, and I have expected the security guard to try to stop me again in a quest to further "shame" me. She said that she had put the yogurt in her bag as she was walking out, instead of at the table like we had done the previous day. I guess this had caused the high alert status.

After breakfast, we got onto the bus, and I started to have horrible stomach pain. The oily food was really starting to have a conflict with my stomach. I was lucky, as we only had to go across the city to get to our first "stop", which was a Chinese "medical" university.  I ran to the bathroom and vomited a few times and came into the group tour room a little late.

The scam at this tourist trap was to put a group of people in a room with a "doctor", or just a person wearing a white coat for all I know, and tell people about the benefits of Chinese acupuncture and herbal remedies. Then, after you get people to drop their defenses, you bring in people that "examine" you, and make suggestions about medicine you can buy at that very hospital to cure you.

The examination was an older Chinese doctor, wearing a white coat, touching your wrist, asking your age, and looking at your tongue. From that information, he would ask a few questions, then make a diagnosis.  He asked me, through a translator, if my hands and feet, "get cold." I honestly didn’t know how to answer that question, so I told them they did. He then declared I had a completely healthy system, but needed to exercise more. I had just gotten done vomiting and being sick in the bathroom, but according to him I was in perfect health. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been to the doctor and not had a negative diagnosis, so I was happy, even if it was totally bogus.

My wife, according to the "doctor" had kidney problems that could be fixed with two courses of medicine that would cost us around ~$400 USD total. Some of what the man had said guessed was accurate, as he stated he thought she might have a hereditary condition.  My wife said that her mother did actually have the thing he had talked about, so maybe he wasn’t a complete scam artist. We waited to return to Korea to buy some medicine just in case. I’ve heard some horror stories about Chinese medicine purchased at these types of places.

From there was a stop at a state owned jade store. They tried to build a sort of museum style atmosphere with the introduction about jade and a tour guide, but they quickly dumped us off in a gigantic jade shop. The quality of the stuff was really bad, and we had to kill over forty minutes walking around looking at terrible quality jade. I did end up buying a name card that had my name phonetically written in Chinese characters. It’s relatively close to the sound of my name, but people in Korea and China pronounce the name a little differently. The three characters mean "horse", "special", and "to make perfect".  The tour guide, and a few other people I showed the card to gave me a generally positive opinion of the characters.

This was the last tourist trap we were taken to the entire trip. The trip was about get a lot better. The next stop was the Great Wall of China.