Doctors and People Seed

So yesterday I went with my bosses to a "hospital". The Koreans call even small clinics hospitals here. In actuality this place resembled more of a chiropractic office from back home, even though nothing chiropractic happens here. It is a fusion between Chinese and Korean traditional style healing... which means.... acupuncture.

My boss' wife was having it done on her hip/back and while she sat there with needles poking out of her back and head it was my turn. Because my right ankle had rolled he stuck 5 needles in my left hand and one in my left shoulder, then made me walk around this room that took two steps to stride across for 5 minutes. Both him and my boss stared at me and kept asking if it was feeling better...uhhhh.... uhh... no.. but they seemed so eager that I just said "ooohh! yes!". It was already getting better on it's own so if I can avoid another visit that's fine with me. I'm not opposed to acupuncture, I've had it before... but acupuncture for a rolled ankle was hardly the treatment needed.

After the doc my bosses took me for lunch. We had a delicious beef, onion and mushroom soup, which again, I didn't finish. I really enjoyed it, but I find the portions over here are just so large. Every time I don't finish a meal my bosses think that I hated it. I tried to explain that back home we typically eat smaller meals more frequently. That's when my boss started in on how Koreans are so much thinner than North Americans. This conversation led him to talking about things like DNA, genomes, and the best of all... "people seed". He was trying to think of the actual word and was getting flustered and looking for my help. I'm sorry but when I hear people seed I think of sperm, obviously. Well my boss couldn't possibly be talking to me about sperm could he? Then he said "bribe" or "tribe" or some word that sounds like it. Umm.. what? I took a look back at the words he had already used and realized that maybe he was thinking of gene... as in "it's in our genes". Yes, that was the word. Thank god I hadn't said sperm, one can only imagine what kind of conversation that would have gotten us in to.