Mi Jeung Park - Operation Eyes Closed

We were born to learn and communicate with literacy; every single thing has words, at least manufacturing company or country, written on them in hardly ignorable size or color. Spending two days without writing for 12 hours from the past Saturday to the next day, now I appreciate a lot that my society has reading and writing systems.
On the first day of the operation, I was invited to my friends’ house for dinner and went to a grocery store to get some desserts for it. What I found interesting there was that it was way easier to recognize flavors of ice cream than I had expected because most of ice cream had very detailed pictures of main ingredients in them and major ice cream company had their own characteristic logos or colors. I was going to get a Cherry Garcia of Ben & Jerry’s. Though it had 70pt-like name of it at the middle of the container and was really hard to ignore it, I could find the exact one anyway because of its symbolic blue sky background with white clouds of Ben & Jerry’s for the original ice cream and green background for froyo and pictures of cherry and chocolate for the Cherry Garcia flavor. There was also a yellow packaged Ben & Jerry’s that I had not seen before and I still have no idea what it was without reading it. It was so catchy that someone who could not reading English would be able to find it if s/he ate it. Although it was easy to recognize company names and flavors, there were no symbolic logos or pictures to identify artificial ingredients and nutrition facts and knowing them were impossible without literacy of English.
My second operation was the next day. I suggested going to Oakland China Town for Dim Sum for lunch with friends for the first time because I do not know Chinese. I took a bus and it did not require reading or writing; what I had to was just asking to bus drivers whether the bus was going to Oakland downtown. If I took BART, I could not buy a ticket without reading what button to push, how much to pay to go to 19th St. Oakland station and the situation would be totally different since there were no logos or symbols to represent each stations. In the restaurant, it was really difficult for non-Chinese to order foods; they wrote names and most ingredients in Chinese characters and only mentioned in English for kinds of meat and the level of spicy was marked with tiny red peppers up to three.
While there were tons of logos and symbols out there, they had limits to give sufficient information other than the names and images of the products. Without literacy, I would not know exactly what I am eating, where I am going or even why I am getting certain things, and now I realized the technology of reading and writing systems has made our life rich in quality of information.