Air

I really like Korea, but the thing I dislike the most is the air quality.  I think a mixture of the yellow dust blowing in from China and the car exhaust mixes together to form a cocktail that spells kryptonite for my lungs.  I've got bad allergies and light asthma, which only exacerbates the problem.  I feel like I've been in bed with allergies for half the time that I've been here; whereas I never got sick at home in the US.  It can pretty frustrating at times.  There's so much to do here, that I hate wasting time by being stuck in bed.

The air quality here is pretty terrible.  Many days it seems as though you could cut the air with a knife, and the mountains that are a mere mile away are barely visible.  I don't feel like I can really 'breathe deep' here.  Busan is much smaller than Seoul, and right by the ocean, so the air quality here is much better than our neighbor to the north.  I think I'd have pneumonia by now if we'd chosen to teach in Seoul.

Hopefully my nose and lungs will adapt!  I leave you with a 30-second 'poem' I wrote while eating dinner at Loving Hut (pretty much the only place you can get vegetarian food in Busan) one evening:

    sweet mist
 on the air
      reeks of sewage
and carefully fermented kimchi
   laced with car exhaust

        breathe deep

capture the crude facsimile of 'progress'
     seeping into your pores