SINGAPORE: A local TikTok user documented her difficult experience after she and her companion got food poisoning in Korea—starting from having to wait one and a half hours to get a taxi and ending up with staying in a hospital emergency room for four to five hours.
Her video shows viewers what to do when you get sick in the middle of the night on a weekend in a foreign country. It is a good reminder to make sure you have travel insurance, as @xueyay says at the beginning of her clip.
“Manifesting those seeing this to not end up sick overseas like we did,” she writes in the caption.
The TikTok user wrote that she, along with an unnamed male companion, fell ill in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, trying to get a cab without a local number proved to be a “nightmare”. She had to run around in the streets for an hour and a half to flag a cab when she couldn’t get a ride via Kakao Taxi, the main app for taking a taxi in Korea.
She added that they were told not to call for an ambulance due to the surcharges they might incur.
It was 7 am before they finally got a cab, which took them to the emergency room of Yongin Severance Hospital.
“We had to come to the ER bcos many medical clinics are closed on Sundays,” she wrote.
She added that passports are required for foreigners admitted to Korean hospitals, both for the patient and the person accompanying them.
Most of the doctors and nurses spoke a little English, and prescriptions and medications are administered in English as well. And for everything else, Xueyay found the Papago translation app to be very useful.
Xueyay and her companion ended up receiving treatment for severe food poisoning—an IV drip and an antibiotic shot.
They needed to pay ₩500,000 (S$500) upon admission, which was offset from their final bill of ₩567,630, which meant they paid around $68 more.
“My debit Mastercard worked fine tiding us through the various charges (no need for Korean bank credit card),” Xueyay said.
/TISG
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