On Not Riding

By David Munson

Photo by Jessica Budde

At 6:20 AM on a Saturday at a public hospital in Changwon, South Korea, the nurses came around to check my vitals, as well as the vitals of everyone else in the room. There were five other patients, all of them middle-aged Korean men. I was the only one under 40 as well as the only foreigner. They evaluated my heart rate and blood pressure, I pantomimed that I was sore but otherwise feeling fine, and they gave me a dose of some kind of pain reliever via a hypodermic injection to the left buttock. At 8:00 AM breakfast arrived. Three meals a day of rice, kimchi, and some manner of soup. I was bored out of my mind.