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What’s happening with COVID-19 in South Korea? Buckle up if you really want to know.
We pause our fun travel stories for a moment to let you know about COVID concerns here. When we arrived in South Korea (ROK) on July 31, the count of new COVID cases for the day was 36. On August 14, our first day out of quarantine, that number was 103. On August 27, it was 441, the highest total since the pandemic spiked here in March. Cases have spread to all 17 regions of the ROK rather than being localized to one area, which was the case with previous outbreaks. Despite this all starting as we finished quarantine, we’re pretty sure we didn’t cause the new outbreak, but here…
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Quarantine: It’s day 8 of 15, but who’s counting?
It never occurred to me to start a blog at any other point my life. A few weeks ago, I joked with some colleagues in Philadelphia that I had no hobbies I could do while sitting still. That’s true at least if you don’t count reading, and even I, a voracious reader, was not excited about the prospect of sitting and reading for 2 full weeks of self-isolation. I know to some that might sound like the best thing ever, but the thought of that much stillness honestly sent me into a panic! Knowing that I would need to quarantine when we arrived in Seoul gave me a strong desire…
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Adventure #2: How we traveled 6,700 miles for COVID tests (Part 1)
When we entered this year, heading to Seoul in the midst of a global pandemic was not on our list of things to do. Multiple times over the past several months, Peter and I looked at each other and said, “we’re crazy, right?” And we probably are. However, it’s not necessarily because we chose to live in South Korea during these COVID times. According to Worldometer, as of August 3, the United States is reporting 4,813,647 total cases of the novel coronavirus, about 26% of the cases in the world. By contrast, South Korea on this date is reporting 14,389 confirmed cases, about .0008% of cases worldwide. This despite the…
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Adventure #1: Arriving at Incheon Airport
After preparing for months for this move, it was surreal to be in the airport and ready to go! It was undeniably strange to travel through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport, where the international departures board was almost empty, and most businesses in the terminal were closed. Stranger yet was traveling with fewer than 100 people on the plane to Seoul (Incheon Airport). We could each have had multiple rows to ourselves on the 15-hour flight, although thanks to the adrenaline rush of traveling we basically didn’t sleep anyway! When we landed in Incheon after an uneventful flight, we were ready to face the hurdles of COVID screening awaiting international visitors…
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The Chemist and the Counselor Take Korea
What’s a social worker with no Korean language skills to do when her partner lands a research sabbatical in South Korea? Start a blog, of course! Does said social worker have any expertise that would suggest she knows how to build a blog? Well, no. But she has two weeks of Korean quarantine time to kill, so why not? Forty-eight hours after signing up for a domain name, many of them spent in figuring out how to get this far, here is the blog we will use to document our time in Korea. Last summer, Peter first started talking with a fellow organometallic chemist in South Korea about the possibility…
