I've never tried out the health care system in Asia before this year.

When I was in Thailand, I went to the hospital for a post-food poisoning visit. I had contracted a nasty virus from food poisoning and spent a good chunk of my time in Thailand feeling miserable and medicated. The doctor asked me some questions and gave me some antibiotics. Thanks Thailand.. for being so very thorough.

Recently, I had a nice little visit to the western hospital in Beijing and I was really impressed by how nice it was and by how much cheaper it was to get a million tests run. They didn't find anything wrong with me which made it mostly a waste of my money but at least I know I'm not hosting some nasty parasite.

This morning I had the joy of going to another clinic.. the official clinic for Foreign Experts. This is where you go to get paperwork done for your visa. Since I'll be changing provinces next year, I have to go through my visa/residence paperwork all over again. The locals here are very particular about their paperwork. Everything gets stamped and signed more than seems necessary. If you don't have things done properly you risk having to do it all over again (which is a whole lot of "ma fan" -- trouble).  Doctors in the States always question why you need certain tests and why everything has to be done a very specific way... when you get your health paperwork done in the States it usually doesn't get done correctly on the first shot. To avoid all of the drama and the cost back in the States is well worth your time. So this morning I went to the clinic with my two teammates who will also be staying in China next year. This was the easiest, quickest thing I've ever experienced in China. Things here are usually either a) difficult or b) confusing..  or something the scary C) BOTH. We had to fill out a little paper about our health history then we visited a few different rooms to get stuff done.
Station One: Blood drawing- one little tube that took about 30 seconds.. very good nurses
Station Two: EKG- actually really funny-- they don't use sensors that stick to you.. it's little suction things that instead get you wet. Result- 78 beats per minute.. is that a little fast? I think I was a little weirded out by the room I was in and perhaps that sped it up.
Station Three: Chest x-ray.. taken by the biggest xray machine I've ever seen (not that I've seen a lot)
Station Four: Blood pressure (seriously,  they had a whole station just for that)
Station Five: Height and weight-- they had this awesome machine that is digital and uses some crazy censor thing to check your height-- it said I was 163 cm.. with my shoes on..   no idea how tall that is
Station Six: It said "ENT" on the paper-- but all they did was have me do a little eye test and she looked in my throat for two seconds...  not a very thorough check-up. And since when do your eyes come under the "ENT" category?

We were in and out of all of this in about 20 minutes which was nice and it was less than $100 to get it all done!

Everytime we went into a different room I was wondering what it would be like to have that kind of job..  to sit in a room by yourself and just check people's blood pressure all day. And the thing is.. everyone who comes there is foreign, so many of them probably don't speak Chinese. I can't imagine having a job where you do only one thing over and over and you can't even talk to the people you're doing it to. I think I'll keep my job.

And hopefully there won't be any more health checkups in the near future.