Since the Lil Buddha is now four months old, it is time for her second round of immunizations.

Seoul has world class health care, with particular skill in obstetrics and pediatrics, with many doctors trained in the US and also ready availability of pharmaceuticals (which is sure to exapnd with FTA, though that is another story. So we felt good about bringing Lark to a doctor here. It turned out to be way cheaper than even going to a doctor in the US. For example, the exam by the doctor was 36000 Won, 36 dollars. That's it. (We also paid the price of the immunizations themselves, of course). In the US, our co-pay is $15 and the doctor proceeds to charge the insurance company a couple of hundred dollars at least, then we also pay for 20% of the drugs too. And we pay a lot each month for the pleasure of being able to pay only a $15 co-pay plus 20%. And, I must say, absolutely everybody we dealt with was more pleasant than most office people I have encountered in American health care.

We are fortunate to live walking distance to enormous, modern, and beautiful Serverance Hospital, which is the teaching hospital for Yonsei University.



The public areas of this hospital are really quite beautiful and very modern and spacious. And free of the dark look, institutional smell, and generally depressing character of, say, the hospital that brought Lark into the world. Here is a grove of trees in the lobby.



The signage is all in Korean and English and it was easy to find our way to the international clinic. From there we were taken to the Children's Hospital where we did wait for a long time as people went in and out of various doors in some kind of mix of Brazil and Fawlty Towers.

It was fortunate that we had some assistance, since walking into the hospital and annnouncing that you have an appointment with "Dr. Kim" probably put us in the same boat as half of the patients. Dr. Kim ended up being an enormously gracious and helpful man.

Lark took the whole thing in style (I think the shots were harder on her mother than on her).

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