My Internet access is not what I had thought it would be: there does not appear to be any Wi-Fi in the house, so I’ll write these on my computer as I am doing now, and then post them from an Internet café as I am able.
It’s surprising how interesting a day I had today, given that I have neither left the house nor, frankly, been awake for very much of it. When I woke up my stomach was feeling off; I had felt a little bit of that last night, and as before I decided to try to sleep it off. At a certain point, it started feeling pretty bad so I went to the bathroom and kind of waited by the toilet for something to happen. Nothing happened for about a half-hour, so I went back and slept some more. When I woke up, after walking around a bit I felt it again, worse, and upon getting to the bathroom I promptly threw up whatever was in my stomach—which was actually not very much. Kind of funny, actually: my digestive system had already sent most of that food on its way, and I pooped it out fine, but the stomach held a grudge or something. Is that called dry-heaving? I would look it up, but I do not have Internet access. (Gosh, I really hope it’s a medical term and not an innuendo…)
This was all kind of part of the plan: my GI tract has grown accustomed to the ultra-high hygiene standards of the United States, where all of our food is expected to be much cleaner than it needs to be. A combination of the higher—but still objectively inoffensive—and the geographically determined difference in mineral content makes the stomach angry. It would, admittedly, be annoying if this happened every day, but my strong impression is that the food will go down much better after the first bit of trouble.
This leads into the next interesting thing that happened. There is a shower, but the water had cut out, so I washed with a carton of hot water and a basin! There is an art to doing this that I haven’t worked out yet; I ended up taking a lot longer than I probably needed to, and also getting a lot of water on the floor rather than in a drain. First times are always instructive, but I did get clean!
After my bath (?), I had some lunch, though not a whole lot because I didn’t want to just throw it all back up. Then I slept some more; some combination of jet-lag and digestive problems has made me pretty tired. When I woke up, there was no electricity. People reacted like this was just a thing that happens every now and then. It came back on pretty quickly (and the water had come back on before—as I was washing, actually). It was still an interesting experience, though: I have been in places where the electricity went out, but it has always been because of some big event like a storm. I have been in places where the water stopped working, but it was always either a storm or pipe maintenance. This is the first time I have experienced both in the same day, or seen them accepted as so normal.
It is getting on toward dinnertime now. I am still getting used to this 6:00 sunset thing, and still working on communicating myself. But to both that and the new things listed above, I am already much more accustomed now than I was before. Hopefully, in the coming days, I will get over my stomach-aches and get out to see some of the city!
New Vocabulary Words for the Day
- kúrúuka: to vomit
- itoroshe: flashlight (“torch”)
- kúváanga: to stir
*Vowels with an acute accent (e.g. á) have a phonetic high tone. Vowels with a circumflex (e.g. â) have a phonetic falling tone. Vowels with no accent have a low tone. Vowels that are doubled are long.
No comments:
Post a Comment