In Sickness and In Health

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when traveling abroad, DON'T DRINK THE WATER!!! However, in Laos, that adage is not necessarily adhered to as strictly. Perhaps in Laos the advice should be eat as the Lao and don't drink the cappuccino. After my second day of teaching, our team headed out for a lunch of Vietnamese wraps and later settled into a cafe for cappuccino, air conditioning, and WI-FI. A caffeine fiend, I had been craving an espresso fix, so I was delighted to discover a hotel/cafe that could deliver. However, a couple of hours later, my stomach was in knots and I spend the entire night in our house bathroom doubled over with diarrhea and vomiting, alternating between thinking I was dying and wishing I were dying. After countless sojourns to the porcelain god, I was at last so weak that I set up tent on the toilet seat hunched over the wastebasket. I was then that I noticed I was not alone. I discovered three visitors had come to keep me company. The first was a large cockroach, blithely making its way into and around the folds of my bath towel. The second was a rather sedentary gecko that stationed itself along on the wall below the shower and simply stared at the stranger on he the toilet seat. The third was the gecko's more energetic relative, which scurried across the bathroom walls, darting in and out of the ceiling to provide entertainment. Surreal was the only word that came to my illness addled mind. Though the source of my sickness eludes me (was it water or coffee or the Vietnamese cuisine?), I am certain that the results served as amusement for my curious collection of Lao animal friends as they witnessed the affects of the collision of cultures on this strange foreigner.