Checkup at the 803 hospital

Today, I was busy and missed my Man­darin classes and instead went for a mil­i­tary checkup at a mil­i­tary hos­pi­tal called “803 hos­pi­tal” when trans­lated into Eng­lish from Mandarin.

It was kind of weird as I was the only west­erner sign­ing up for the required mil­i­tary ser­vice, although lit­tle did those around me know that I am in-fact Tai­wanese.  I had a group of women sol­diers who helped me and I think took a keen inter­est in me; let’s just say.

For exam­ple, I had this one women who was infat­u­ated with talk­ing to me in Man­darin. While oth­ers were talk­ing behind my back say­ing things like “he is so cute” etc. It was a funny expe­ri­ence for sure. How­ever they were very help­ful and beau­ti­ful too! Plus, they taught me a few words which I would likely have never learned as I would have never asked any­one, how­ever the words are, I think, very useful.

What did they check?

They checked my blood, teeth, brain, heart and just about every­thing; while ask­ing me a few ques­tions here and there.

Of course my Tai­wanese friend lied to me when he said they would check my pri­vate area, which I believe for sure now he was try­ing to scare me. Although they may have changed pro­ce­dures see­ing as he was in the mil­i­tary 2 years ago. Per­haps they stopped check­ing peo­ples pri­vates. Though it doesn’t really make sense to me as to why they would want to check that area in the first place. So I’ve con­cluded he was just hav­ing me on.

Quite an enjoy­able day, although the long bus jour­neys all around Taichung were a lit­tle tir­ing. I should also receive my “National Health Insur­ance card” in 2 weeks time, con­sid­er­ing I’ve been Tai­wanese for over 4 months now; which is always nice to have.

I’m also going to include another story in this post, con­sid­er­ing I think it is a lit­tle funny, plus I have a pic­ture to go along with it.

Okay, so yes­ter­day, I needed to get pic­ture of myself for my National Health Insur­ance card, so I needed to find a place where I could get that done. My South Korean friend said he knew a place, against the advice of my own, where I kind of knew a place already or one of those auto­matic pho­to­graph booth’s which you do all by your­self. How­ever instead, I took his advice, he said this other place was closer to where I lived, so I thought “Why not?”.

I got the pic­tures done, and the man said $293NT and I looked at Jun sur­prised as I only wanted to pay like $100NT  for a pic­ture. How­ever, appar­ently this guy Photoshop’s these pic­tures to make the face look much more soft. (Although I can do this myself) Any­ways, I needed the pic­tures for the next day, how­ever the man said that wasn’t pos­si­ble, after I had paid him. I accepted this and didn’t com­plain. Then I went to the place that I knew from before and got my pic­tures done for $150NT. (Appar­ently they bumped the price up by $50NT) — On that night, I got my pic­tures done and I used the $150NT pic­tures for the next day as the more expen­sive pic­tures would have come too late.

How­ever, now I have 12 of these small pic­tures, which I’m not able to use which all look like this:

Now, I just want to point out that this is def­i­nitely pho­to­shopped. I’m cer­tain as you can’t see any spots on my face and I have a few here and there; which he has con­ve­niently removed. Haha.  I’ll go and say this: This is pretty epic and I pretty much smiled when the lady gave me these photo’s over the counter. LOL.