March 20, 2008 - Bodhgaya, Varanasi, Jaipur – India
(have kind of slept our way through all 3 places, unfortunately)

I just ate a lovely meal of Farfalle with Tomato sauce, a mixed mango & orange juice, and fresh salad*. This sounds ridiculously bland and uninteresting, especially for India, but it was extremely special for me because it is the first real meal I’ve ingested since about 6 days ago. The cast iron stomach is no longer, the flag has fallen, the white flag is up, and dis white girl ain’t eatin’ no more of dem foreign foods (or at least until I get tempted beyond bearing!).

How did this happen? I’m not quite sure. Getting hooked up to an IV at the lone tiny hole-in-the-ground medical clinic in Bodhgaya, India, after having collapsed in the local internet café and been driven by the café owner’s son by motorcycle to the doctor’s home (he wasn’t at work at the time, a little plastic sign on his door said so) makes for a good story though, I suppose. Better in retrospect than living through it at the time.
Also still not sure of the cause, but whatever it was, it made for a very painful evening of ‘food exorcism’, shall we say (it’s consistently amazing to me how easy it is to read about someone else being sick and briefly thinking to yourself how unfortunate it is, compared with the agony when it’s actually you lying next to the toilet at 3am and wondering how it’s possible to continue retching even when there’s nothing left to vomit and all you want is to be able to lie down in peace for a couple of minutes - preferably not on the cement bathroom floor. Anyway…).

Evy was feeling faint the day after my night at the toilet (the only thing worse about being sick is both being sick) so I was elected to go to the internet café to attempt to book our train ticket (we’d already postponed by one day, we couldn’t do another due to other bookings we’d made prior to being sick). This expedition to the internet, as I mentioned, led to me collapsing with severe chest pains and lack of circulation to my arms (no one’s been able to explain that one to me yet) which led to the motorcycle trip, the doctor’s house, the tourist booking office, and then the medical clinic with the IV.

Why, one might ask, did I go to the tourist booking office between the doctor’s and the medical clinic? As far as I can tell, this was purely so the Internet café owner’s son, aka motorcycle guy, could get a commission by getting me to buy my train tickets through this place that was on the way back from the doctor’s. I was a little too out of it to argue, and in the end we really did need the tickets, extra payment or not. I would’ve been more angry if motorcycle guy hadn’t been so kind to me, taking me everywhere, from café to clinic, clinic to doctor’s, doctor’s to clinic, picking up Ev to come visit and then dropping her back off, and even eventually helping me pick up plain rice at a late night restaurant and dropping me back off at night at the hotel (long after any other type of transportation I might have used was running). If he was a little over-attentive at times, I was appreciative enough that I didn’t say anything. Even when he brought his friend so they could both sit and chat at me while I was held captive by the IV. White girls are fascinating to most Indians, but especially for wannabe-cool teenaged boys, it seems.

The next day, while I was having a check-up with the Doctor, Ev fainted in the Doctor’s bathroom. 10 minutes later she was hooked up to an IV. Oh Bodhgaya. Somehow we have no interest in ever coming back.

*(Corey, if you’re reading this, I apologize for the detailed description of food. As I wrote this I thought of our conversation about how excruciatingly boring it is to hear people’s blow-by-blow food consumption in blog format… never again!)