a little stroll

Compared to yesterday, when things were so miserable that I thought I might drop dead, today (well, Wednesday) was a hell of a lot better. This may be partly because my boss handed me the remaining box of his "tiger milk mushroom" medicine, which he said he'd bought when he'd first gotten COVID. Ever circumspect, I looked up some research on the effectiveness of this product; this paper's abstract was cautiously positive, so I tentatively concluded, This couldn't hurt. I'd been feeling better all day, frankly, and even after taking the mushroom extract after lunch, I didn't worsen, so I decided, at the end of the day, to walk home.

It wasn't as though I could walk as if nothing had happened. At about the halfway point, I sat down for about 5-7 minutes to take a breather—something I'd never do if things were normal. The problems I had along the way were less about breathing and more about the strain on my heart: it was as if COVID had left some kind of limiter on my heart that meant I got very light chest pains when my heart started beating too fast. By the time I sat down to rest, the chest pains were hard to ignore even though they weren't severe. My rest spot was right before a ramp I normally take to get back up from creek level to street level; it's basically a short hill that normally doesn't affect me that much, but this time around, it was the only part of the walk where I did have a bit of trouble with my breathing—just a little bout of breathlessness. And sweatiness. Then I was over the footbridge, walking the bridge's downhill ramp, and back in my neighborhood. The final few hundred meters were pretty much fine. It's getting warm at night now, and the air quality hasn't been bad for the past few days. Somewhere near the beginning of my walk, I took my windbreaker off and tied it around my waist.

As I discovered while walking, the cherry blossoms, called 벚꽃/beot-ggot (which to me sounds like "butt-goat"), are now out in force. Within the space of a week, my neighborhood went from one single blossoming tree to an explosion of cherry blossoms. I tried to capture some of that vegetal effusion during my walk, as you'll see in the photos below.

creekside butt-goat, nighttime

getting close to the footbridge leading to my neighborhood; butt-goat lit by electric lighting

a closer peek

Seoul's tallest phallic symbol for the moment: the Lotte World Tower in Jamshil, across from the Tan Creek

the footbridge that aims me at my place, framed by butt-goat

blossoms at the footbridge

closer, my sweeties

gaudy, springtime colors for the footbridge's illumination

So I made it home safe and alive. I'm not at 100% yet, but I'm optimistic that I'll be there soon, finally able to resume staircase work. I'm meeting that distance-walking couple on April 13 (they're doing the Four Rivers from Busan to Seoul), and I hope to be mostly or wholly better by then. Let's hope Tuesday's misery was a one-day-only thing.

My boss and ex-coworker were both tickled by the "butt-goat" concept, so they contributed their own images.

The boss somehow persuaded an AI to produce the above image.

My ex-coworker sent me this, but I'm wondering whether it's really a goat or a recently shorn sheep.