Ain’t No Party Like a Quarantine Party

The Korean swine flu paranoia has reached-dare I say-epidemic proportions. We had all been vaguely suspicious that our seven day orientation was mostly for quarantine purposes, but we’re certain now. One of the trainers noted that we would have ordinarinarly seen our schools and maybe even our apartments if it weren’t for our good friend H1N1. Self temperature checks had been mandatory, but we have recently upgraded to daily professional inspection. People are cryptically called to speak with the staff at the end of lectures. And the Seoul City Tour, where we would have possibly not even stepped off the bus, was canceled. The program directors partly filled this gap in the program with, I kid you not, “reflection time”.

This is all happening while the hundreds of us are milling around with each other, and the university staff and students, making it fairly ineffective as far as overzealous responses go. I can’t really complain that they’re not doing more, however. And in fairness, even while we’re all getting campus fever and hoping to see our homes for the next year, we are having a pretty good time. We spend a significant amount of our free time joking and complaining about the quarantine and our boredom, which leads to constant comments about much better morale would be if they let us drink.

Then, to distract ourselves from the realization of the extent of alcoholism, we suck it up and find things to do. We started with milling around the campus, then having movie nights. And then, for lack of anything else, we played games of Mafia and Ten Fingers. Clearly, our continued sobriety has caused us to severely regress. Thankfully, on the current schedule we’ll all be out of here before we’re playing with blocks and taking a scheduled naptime. If not, please send some Lunchables to Suwon.