So Close

Warning: this post is not for the easily grossed out.

I am in the home stretch. I was in the home stretch on Sunday and I thought that I was going to not have a single stomach issue. Alas, it was not to be.

Sunday night, while many of you were celebrating with your fathers, or enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon, I was lying in bed contemplating whether death by various means of torture would be better than the angony that I was in. About 11 o'clock, I had a sharp pain in my abdomen and then a moment of hesitation as if my body was trying to decided in which direction it would be faster to expel the offending substance from my body (and at various points of the night, both directions won out). Thankfully, this gave me enough time to get out of bed and make it to the bathroom. It lasted for SIX hours and was accompanied by a 102 degree fever. I was misearble. Thankfully, at about 5AM, I was able to sleep for a short while. It was obvious that I couldn't go to class when I woke up and threw up the apple juice I tried to drink. So, Monday was waste of a day. I just laid around and waited to fill better.

The irony is that I do not think that it was Chinese food that made my feel bad. This was not my stomach just disagreeing with food. I have no doubt that it was food poisoning and I think that it was from the sandwich at Subway. Sunday was the first day that the Subway opened here and my American friends were super excited about it. So we went to get sandwiches for dinner. Nevermind that only 2 days ago, the building had no glass and no equipment. The chinese have a way of leaving stuff out (like the egss are just on a random shelf in the supermarket) and so who knows how long the meat was out. I think that it was the turkey.

And another thing that is different here. There is no health code for resturants and certainly no reporter going around and telling you the rating of various restaurants. At one of my favorite places, a haven of Western food if you will, I recently watched a roach crawl across a table. (I am choosing to forget that it happened and I will henceforth put it out of my mind.) And yesterday at Pizza Hut, we watched a boy about 6 years of age walk up the salad bar, study the ranch dressing and then lick the ladle before returning it to the container. Thankfully, none of us were eating salad.