I’ve generally considered myself somewhat lucky, at least while traveling. I always seem to be catching trains at the last minute, or finding cheap places to stay, or getting flights canceled only to be rerouted on better schedules. I suspect it’s just a knack I have; I’ve always been something of a canny traveler, and I’ve built up an arsenal of tricks and hunches without really being aware of them. Couple that with a certain blithe ignorance¹ that things might not work out and you can manufacture a great deal of luck on your own.

So I don’t know if there’s a good way to weather a pandemic, but I’ve probably done about as well as one might. I headed to Southeast Asia just at the start of the whole thing, when it wasn’t entirely clear how badly it was going to break out of China. Most of February and March I spent in a region almost completely unaffected by travel restrictions, with restaurants still open and tours still operating and no social isolation rules in effect. And just at the end, when the reality of the situation finally sunk in and the borders started to shut down, I canceled all my plans² and headed to Seoul.

And I’ve been there ever since. I’m finally moving on³ because I’m getting antsy after being here for six weeks. This is by far the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I started traveling, and it’s weird how much that’s bothering me. It’s comforting to know you’ve got someplace safe to be during an emergency. But I abandoned that when I left New York City,⁴ and I’m used to being without it. I’ve been offsetting a lot of the loneliness and isolation by filling my life with new places and new experiences, and I just can’t do that now. And I don’t know when I’ll be able to do that again.

I arrived in South Korea in late March, and promptly went into self-isolation. I didn’t need to — at the time it was advised but not required by the Korean government — but I did it out of an abundance of caution and a sense of solidarity with everyone who didn’t have the choice. I kind of regret it in retrospect.⁵ I missed the cherry blossom season, so when I finally did start wandering out into the city I was greeted with the cheerful sight of lots of dead flowers scattered around the trees.

South Korea managed to shut down a pretty scary Coronavirus outbreak without resorting to the same general lockdowns that other places have had to. That’s led to a very surreal experience living here. The city isn’t open open — the schools have been closed, as well as museums and concert halls and any place that requires large gatherings — but that doesn’t apply to restaurants or bars or movie theaters or saunas or hair salons or public transit or any of the other hallmarks of the shutdown in other countries. So I’m inundated with news from all over the globe, and stories from my friends in New York and San Francisco and London, and I’m mostly unaffected.

But the news outside has been grim, which hasn’t exactly encouraged me to venture forth and explore the city. And often the stuff I’m most interested in seeing, like the museums, are shut down. So I haven’t really wandered out the way I was hoping to. In one of the relatively few places in the world I could be freely hitting the town, I find I’m staying in as often as not.

That isn’t to say I haven’t gotten out from time to time. I’ve been visiting the (mostly socially distanced) restaurants, doing grocery runs,⁶ taking care of some medical issues, even doing some touristy stuff for what’s been open. So I’ve at least gotten some sense of what Seoul feels like, even in this odd time.

It’s easy to feel the medieval city Seoul once was while wandering around. Not because of the buildings — discounting the Hangul it feels just as modern as anywhere⁷ — but because the streets are the same twisty, hilly maze I suspect they’ve been for the past 500 years.⁸ It’s great if you’ve got the time to get lost and enjoy it, but supremely annoying if you’re trying to locate some random store that’s supposed to be here, down this alley, somewhere.

I’ve spent a frightening amount of time wandering around those alleys looking for one restaurant or another. Everybody praises the food in Seoul, but I suspect everyone who does is heavily into seafood or bulgogi. As a vegetarian, I’m finding it far more frustrating than not. To start with, there’s the language barrier. English signs and labels are spotty at best and the chance of a server being able to answer a question like “was this made with fish stock?” is nearly impossible.⁹ I usually get around this kind of issues by looking places up online and checking out the menu ahead of time, but shockingly few places have websites. I’ll find a restaurant near where I’m at and either end up on their Facebook page or on their Instagram account, hoping they’ve bothered to take a picture of the menu and upload it.

But really, it’s the food culture. Everything has meat in it. Noodle shops will exclusively offer fish or pork broth. Burritos will be offered in your choice of chicken or beef. Maybe 5% of burger restaurants offer a veggie patty. Even my usual fallback of Italian places will often have at best a marinara option and an aglio e olio option; no alfredo, no pesto, no arrabiata. I mean, they’ll have those other sauces, but they’ll be packed with shrimp or bacon or sausage and I despise being someone who’s trying to order off menu.¹⁰

But I’ve been getting by. There’s an English language food delivery service which is pricey but reliable. Pizza is generally an option.¹¹ Indian restaurants abound. Mexican places will usually have a cheese quesadilla and sometimes a vegetable burrito. And once I moved to trendy Gangnam there were even some great vegan restaurants, a few of which offered a respectable bulgogi. Now that I can get behind.

If there’s one advantage to being in one place for months, it’s that I’ve finally been able to get my knee properly tested. My right knee swelled up in December, and while over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications have been keeping it in check, the fact that it never seemed to be getting any better led me to finally get some more extensive testing done.

The South Korean medical system is, as you might expect, ruthlessly efficient. I called around to a number of international clinics and finally found one that could fit me in as soon as the self-imposed quarantine I was under ended.¹² That ended on Saturday, and on Monday I was on my way to Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital for an appointment.

From the outside it was clear they were in Coronavirus mode. All the entrances except for one were shut down, and the one that was open had tenting set up outside and a vaguely socially-distanced line to get inside. You were required to fill out a form attesting you hadn’t been outside the country in the past two weeks and you didn’t have a fever¹³ which you had to sign.¹⁴ You then had your temperature scanned, they stamped your paper, and you were let in.

And … inside was normal. One of the elevators was shut down so you couldn’t go directly to the lower levels of the parking garage. Some of the more crowded waiting areas had every other seat blocked off to separate people, although not many people were paying attention to it. And of course everyone was wearing masks.

The whole process was pretty smooth. I checked in at the clinic, filled out some forms, and went in to see the doctor. She ordered a whole bunch of tests — fluid draws on my knee,¹⁵ about a dozen different X-rays, blood and urine samples — and ordered a bunch of medications. I then went back to the front desk, and after I checked out and paid for everything, they handed me a small map of the hospital, with all of the places I needed to go circled and numbered in the order I needed to go to them. So the next two hours were spent running to the X-ray and going through that process, then heading to the rheumatology lab to get my knees drained, etc, etc, finally culminating by grabbing my medications from the in-house pharmacy. Easy.

I went back for a follow up a week later, and have a confirmed diagnosis: psoriatic arthropathy.¹⁶ It’s an autoimmune disorder, and there’s no cure but there are treatments. So I’m now on methotrexate, which is kind of the first line of therapies to try. And it seems to be helping, but it’s one of those drugs with potentially horrific side-effects, so it takes weeks to build up to a really therapeutic dose, all the while having your blood tested to make sure you’re not dissolving your kidneys or something while you’re on it.

So lucky that I’m stuck here for weeks, I guess. I’ve been on this stuff for a bit now, slowly transitioning off the steroids I was taking while the tests were happening, and it seems to be working. I’m still not walking quite normally (although it’s better than it used to be)¹⁷ and my knees are weirdly sore most of the time.¹⁸ But I can walk down stairs for the first time in ages, and if this is as bad as my joints get for the next 25 years of my life, honestly, it’ll be a blessing.

So I’m finishing this on the flight to Jeju. If I had to guess I’m about two-thirds of the way through my stay in South Korea. By my visa I’m halfway done; I arrived six weeks ago, and it expires in another six weeks. I’m guessing regional travel will open a bit sooner than that. Korean Air just resumed another 146 flights a week, up from about 50,¹⁹ and it’s possible travel to Japan or Taiwan or China might become possible without a 14-day quarantine.

But nobody really knows, and it’s just as likely that things will remain locked down, in which case I have to worry about getting a visa extension²⁰ or look into moving on anyway. I’m not worried for myself — returning to the United States is always going to be an option, as horrifying as it sounds, so it’s not like I’m going to be stranded at some airport for years while lawyers argue my case.

But it’s the not knowing that’s the difficult part. I’ve usually got things triangulated out weeks and months ahead of time²¹ and there’s no way of doing that now. If I could wave a wand and make this all go away I’d be on a flight back to Berlin immediately. Instead, I’m stuck someplace where I can’t leave and I can’t see my friends and I don’t know when any of this will ever go back to “normal.” So my experience here might be atypical and is certainly better than being stuck in lockdown, but I don’t feel I’ve exactly missed the Coronavirus experience, either.

See you all soon.

Next: Jeju (CJU) to Seoul (GMP)
Prev: Bangkok (BKK) to Seoul (ICN)

Footnotes

¹ Only slightly calculated

² As did the rest of the world

³ For a little over a week, to Jeju Island, so no leaving Korea yet

⁴ Not that New York would be a comforting place to be, these days

⁵ I know, there’s no real way of being sure you don’t have it, and I could have caught it while I was on the nearly empty flight. But it turns out nobody on my flight had it — I know that because the contact tracing here is sufficiently good that if they did, I would have known about it — so it’s pretty clear I didn’t.

⁶ Since the places I’m staying don’t afford much opportunities for cooking, I’m usually trying to stock up on snacks and drinks. For some reason, it’s really hard to find diet soda in Korea. Which is a problem, because I don’t drink coffee or tea and I really don’t want to go through the trouble of detoxing from caffeine at the moment.

You can usually — usually — find slim 250 ml cans of Coke Zero in the convenience stores. 7-11’s will generally have larger sizes, at least the 500 ml bottles. Since I’m staying indoors far more often than I usually do, I’ve been trying to buy two liter bottles, and I usually have to look through about a dozen 7-11’s before I find one that carries them.

Coke Zero is literally the only diet soda I’ve seen carried in stores.

⁷ Singapore has it beat in fancy futuristic architecture, but Seoul covers a much larger area.

⁸ Bizarrely, Google Maps doesn’t work for walking directions in Seoul, ostensibly because of the threat of a North Korean invasion. The thought of a tank division held up while someone tries to get signal on their cell phone is kind of amusing, but I bet it’ll happen on some urban battlefield somewhere, if it hasn’t yet.

In reality, the snit is over where the mapping data resides. South Korea wants it stored on datacenters in South Korea. Google doesn’t want to open a datacenter in South Korea. Korean mapping companies don’t want Google to compete with their apps, so they’re lobbying to keep the restriction in place.

So I’m sticking to public transit directions.

⁹ This isn’t a criticism — I certainly don’t expect non-English-speaking countries to cater to English speakers, and am always tremendously grateful when they do — but having just passed through an array of countries which tended to, either from tourism (e.g., Thailand), history (e.g., Singapore), or both (e.g., Vietnam) it was a little startling.

I did attempt to learn some Korean, but after about five hours trying to learn the alphabet on Duolingo I realized I wasn’t going to be able to pick up enough to make it at all useful in the time I had left in the country and gave it up.

¹⁰ In fairness, they’ll usually have a mushroom risotto as well. Turns out I’m mostly lukewarm on mushroom risotto.

¹¹ Especially if you’re into white pizzas topped with potato or creamed corn. It’s frequently more like flatbread than pizza, but you can stick to tomato sauce and cheese melted over bread which remains difficult to screw up too badly.

¹² They reasonably wouldn’t have accepted me as a patient before the two weeks were up, anyway.

¹³ There’s a whole other process, I assume, if you were showing possible COVID-19 symptoms.

¹⁴ Confusingly, there were two blanks at the bottom labeled “Confirmation” and “Signature” and I was chided for signing the wrong one. The confirmation blank is where you sign to confirm your information, the signature blank is where they stamp to confirm your confirmation. I hope the Korean-language forms are better labeled.

¹⁵ Conveniently, my left knee swelled up like a balloon a couple days before my appointment. So I couldn’t walk well at all, but I was able to get it looked at and treated at the same time I was doing that for the right knee.

¹⁶ Well, confirmedish. A lot of these diseases look a lot like each other, so often you make your best guess and if the treatment works, well, that’s what you had.

Since I have psoriasis, and they’ve ruled out gout or a ligament tear or a bone chip or an infection, psoriatic arthropathy is a pretty good guess.

¹⁷ I pointed out I still couldn’t completely straighten my right leg and the doctor kind of shrugged and said “Maybe it’s permanent” so that’s something to look forward to.

¹⁸ I am seriously wondering if it’s a good idea to try and ski again. Skiing is one of the few physical activities I actually felt like I wasn’t a complete disaster at so that’s a bit sad, not that I got out to do it all that often.

¹⁹ Before everything shut down, it was running 900 flights per week.

²⁰ South Korea did automatically extend all international visas at some point in March, before I arrived, after all the flights got grounded and travel became very dicey. There’s likely a process for that in place, which I might or might not qualify for.

²¹ As an ex once put it: “You plan things, Chris. You’re a planner.” She was not being complimentary.