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It’s Been a Rough Week

By itsmaggiegwu

Last weekend started out as an adventure. My housemate,  Makiyah and I, decided to pay a visit to the Good Fortune Supermarket down in East Falls Church in Virginia. We've been missing a lot of Chinese/Asian foods in our diet because it's always been Trader Joe's or Safeway for us. We hopped onto the 4B a few blocks from our apartment and was on our merry way.

Good Fortune resides in Eden, a complex that has a variety of Asian (Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, you name it!) restaurants, bakeries, and shops. We window shopped for food at nearly every shop before sitting down to have a good bowl of pho. We needed the energy before going into Good Fortune. It was an Asian supermarket but nothing I've ever seen before. It was big, which fits well with the "everything-is-big-in-America" theme. They had a great range of fruits (Asian pears, durian, longans) and vegetables (bok choi, turnips) at very decent prices. I ended up buying 3 lbs of bok choi for about $3 which probably would have been double the price in Wholefoods. They also had a live seafood section with lobsters and fish. A BBQ section with BBQ pork, duck, chicken. A bakery with the egg tarts, pineapple buns, pork floss buns. And everything else in between. It was difficult to decide what to buy but I had to restrain myself because we had to bus back.

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The next few days of the week were pure agony. It was probably from an accumulation of things but I had a severe case of tonsillitis that was met with 2 visits to the ER. I wanted to write about it briefly in case any exchange students are met with an unfortunate illness that requires them to go to the hospital. The experience wasn't all that horrible. I went to Virginia Hospital both times because I figured that it'll have less of a wait (and also I live in Virginia). You sign in at the ER and wait to be called in for them to do a triage. After that either a doctor or physician will have a look at you (depending on the severity of your case I guess). The second time I had to stay for a few hours because they had given me IV drips for my infection and inflammation and had a CT scan done in case there was any abscess (there wasn't, thank God). I felt a hell lot better when I walked out of that ER and I'm glad that I went even though initially I thought I could just sit and let it slide at home. The bills will probably come in the mail soon, but luckily I have insurance that'll cover me.

 

It's been a rollercoaster of a week, but I've learnt something new: living away from home is difficult and there's only you to take care of yourself. So make sure you do.