Evening everyone (Well it's evening here anyway!)Time for the usual weekend update. After the displeasure of spending a large proportion of time in pain last week, I was pretty glad it was time for the weekend come Friday at 5.50pm.
I spent most of the evening browsing the net and icing my leg with the hope that some of the swelling would go down on my foot.
I joined the rest of the guys on a trip to Ocha's for dinner but decided against a visit to NOW bar this week, instead choosing to spend some quality time with the TV! Saturday came and I was booked into for a visit to the doctor. Instead of making the visit this week I decided to give Haji and Elizabeth a call to see if they could help me out and they agreed to pick me up in the afternoon.
Unfortunately when I got to the hospital, it appears that at some point wires got crossed, and pens wrote things they shouldn't have as it turns out that Dr's don't work on Saturday's and there was no-one there to help me out!
I was pretty frustrated as you can imagine, I was wanting to know if my injury had made any progress at all but for one reason or another I guess that wouldn't be possible. I went down to the emergency dept. where I had been the previous weekend and they instructed me to take off the cast I was wearing and give my foot some air over the weekend and then return on Monday.
Pretty annoyed that I wasn't to find out any kind of information, I found walking easier than I though it would be although with pressure being on my foot for the first time in a week, the first few steps hurt like hell. After that, aside from a little bit of a hop-along swagger I was managing to cope. Charlie gave me a call and said he was heading into Yungtung to finally get himself a PS3. In need of a new hard drive I decided to join him and Alex on their journey, mainly to get some fresh air as I have discovered that sheltering inside in Korea is about as fun as it is in England!
Before we met Alex in Suwon me and Charlie headed to a 'Smoothy King' chain to pick up some lunch. I sampled some more excellent food (I realise that BBQ chicken wraps aren't traditionally Korean but it was lovely) I also had a strawberry and lemon smoothy which was fantastic! I'm sure I will be visiting there again at some point!
We headed off on the usual crowded subway to Yungtung and after about three hours of walking around and checking prices we each picked up a valuable item to bring home with us. Charlie got himself a PS3, Alex got himself an HD monitor to play his previously purchased console on and I got a 1TB hard drive for about a quarter of the price you can in England which I was pretty pleased about.
I was even more pleased by a brief stop in the station mall to pick up some food at an American fried chicken restaurant called 'Popeye.' Now I am a big fan of KFC, anyone who knows me will realise that but I think they may have some competition on their hands if Popeyes ever decided to open in England. For 7600 won (about £3.50) we managed to pick up three sizable pieces of chicken, some seasoned fries, re-fillable cups of Mountain Dew and also some 'biscuits' which were actually like warm scones and served with jam. They were absolutely incredible and I reckon that meal filled me up the most since I came to Korea. Not a bad day out at all really.
What I wasn't too delighted about was the horiffic wait for the subway home and then the ridiculous overcrowded compartments which awaited us! I decided to fill in the painful hours journey by playing on my PSP and I couldn't even get any peace doing that as I had about three people looking over my shoulder seeing exactly what I was up to.
Returning home to find that his PS3 didn't exactly 'work like a dream' Charlie and me headed to Alex to rescue his extra controller from round there so we could play some games together. A few hours later we headed back to Hwaseo-dong for some much needed rest.
I decided that after a throughly exhausting week that I deserved a lie in and although I'm not really feeling like it did me any good as I was very tired when I woke up this morning, it was enjoyable to get a decent night of sleep and take away the pain of my foot for a little while.
As we got paid on Friday I decided it was time to spend a little bit of money doing food shopping at E-Mart, Charlie came along for the adventure and tried to help me find the list of ten things I had written down in the strange environment.
Unfortunately for Charlie things hadn't quite been working out his way over the weekend either and in a rash moment of impatience to wash his bedcovers he accidently threw his remote control in the washing machine wrapped up in his duvet! Whoops! He tried his best to find a new one at E-Mart but our TV is made by some very small Korean company and unless you have an LG or a Samsung it's pretty difficult to communicate exactly what you need.
He soon cheered up though when we headed down to the 'food' section of the supermarket though I'm not sure if it was the free samples of pretty much everything that were on offer or the ability to buy American brewed beer which cheered him up.
I'm pretty gutted I didn't take my camera with me actually because the sight of a high-tech supermarket being taken over by vendors trying to upsell pretty much every they had in stock was quite a sight.
We made our way around the outside of the shop picking up all he stuff we needed and basically trying out anything that looked like it wasn't still moving (and of course didn't have tentacles.) We fear at one point we at something which looked like big snout and there was also a lady who forced what looked and tasted like ground up pebels on us but there were some highlights including some nice fresh hamburgers and some cranberry juice!
The evening was spent combining a few games on the Playstation with a re-organisation of my room which gives me a little bit more floor space. When I first moved in I'm sure I tried to restructure my room the way it is now but for some reason it didn't want to work. Yesterday I had little trouble trying to do what I wanted to do and although my room still feels like a corridor with furniture in it, I'm a little happier it's the way I want it.
Later on I joined up with Alex, Charlie, Kevin and Anna and we went to the bowling alley just down the road together. A long time ago we had seen a bowling pin sitting outside our main bank but had failed miserably to try and find where it was. Turns out it was on the floor we hadn't explored so the five of us played a couple of games. It has been a while since I turned my hand to bowling and with a very painful ankle it was less than easy to bowl. The first few frames probably go best unmentioned but I still didn't come last with my score of 80-something as Charlie and Anna tied on 67. It was even more hilarious that Charlie said if Anna beat him he'd go back to the US!!!
In the second game I managed to make a late run at Kevin who was leading by miles and miraculously came away with a win! I think the other guys should be pretty disappointed that a man with basically one leg and little ability to bend or bowl was able to beat them, but I guess it shows that it has nothing to do with finesse and is all about technique.
When I got back I watched the very enjoyable French Open final and at that point decided to call it a night before it got too late.
I really haven't been doing anything of note at all today though I did finally get my Dr's appointment sorted. The news wasn't the best and although the people I went to see on Friday told me to take the cast off the Orthapedic surgeon was pretty clueless as to why hey had instructed me to do that. Apparently now that my foot is a little less swolen, he guesses that there is medial ligament damage to my ankle which is why it hurts so much. He also said that there may be a fracture of some bones in my foot which hasn't shown up on the x-ray but would explain why the swelling is still so extreme.
I have to be honest it does suck that it's taken me this long to actually damage myself seriously, and as I said before, only I could manage to a foreign country and do this. I was well aware that it wouldn't be as simple to cure as a sprain or a twist but I just hope that whatever damage is done can be repaired as I would hate to lose my whole summer or some excellent oppertunities to do anything because of a very inocuous accident which happens to me basically every game I play!
For the rest of the week I will be doing my best to rest, ice, compress and elevate my foot with the hope that by the time I have to return next thursday there is a bit more good news!
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