Monday,
29/10/2012 – 137 A.D.
Really not the best day at all, dear
readers. We found ourselves camped out in the windowless room this morning, mainly
doing admin, but there was also an underlying lack of motivation for getting
out and about. We both felt reasonably okay, but not quite 100%. Suddenly I
noticed a weird shimmery-kaleidoscope-type thing going on in the corner of my
right eye. It wasn’t directly in front of where I looked, more off to the
right, but I couldn’t tell if it was growing larger. Possibly it had developed
form staring too hard at a white-backed computer screen, I don’t know. This was
quite a disturbing sensation, especially as I didn’t know if the shimmery-blur
was going to get much larger, but then I remembered that it happened some time
in America and faded away soon enough.
Twenty minutes later and I was back to
normal, at least so I thought. Then I noticed I had a headache coming on the
left side of my head, which became stronger and more focused just behind my
eyeball. I dropped a couple of paracetemols, but it wasn’t getting any better
and - shock horror – I didn’t have an appetite for lunch…and this was coming up
to 14:00! And I had a strange sweat on, despite the aircon whirring away. I wondered
if things would improve if we went for a walk, so we headed two minutes down
the road to the nearby STA Travel to get a quote on the flight we wanted out of
China. While the woman waited for the results to come back, I realised that I
definitely was not feeling good and needed to get back to a horizontal position
asap. And so we ignored the inflated quote we received and walked the two
minutes back to the hotel, at which point mood lighting came on, I got my head
down and Tim had a snack, then found himself falling asleep as well. Way to
spend an afternoon, guys!
A couple of hours later and I awoke,
seemingly feeling better. Appetite had returned, which was fab, and I munched
on a few nearby Pringles, or rather the brand of crisps known as ‘Mister Potato’
and its own version of Pringles. Just to check one was on an even keel again, I
went for a walk around the block with the iPod, then headed down to the nearby
park to test something out. I’d read in the guidebook that if you go and sit on
your own in this park around late afternoon, you will be approached by local
students wanting to practice their English. So I found a bench to
myself, put away the Ipod and waited. Five minutes later and a girl came and sat
next to me. Then another girl and a guy arrived and started speaking to me. Next
thing I knew, I was swarmed upon by students from all sides, forming a big
crowd around me to listen to my supposed words of wisdom! There must have been
at least 12 of them, plus one middle-aged tour guide who probably spoke better
English than I did. It was a really good experience speaking to these
fresh-faced youngsters, telling them all about my travelling, explaining some
of the idiosyncrasies of intermediate English grammar, and trying not to make
my job sound too boring. In fact, if there is one thing that I taught these
future workers of Vietnam then it’s that a good manager does not need to shout
at their staff to get them to work. If these kids come to have staff working under them down the line then those staff will thank me for that one!
I didn’t have my camera, and I’d stayed out
longer than planned, so I headed back in case Tim worried that I’d fallen in a
gutter and lain there prone (like a lot of the locals, coincidentally). Like I
said at the start of the post, the day was a bit of a write-off, but at least
the “mini migraine”, if one can call it that, was over. And to celebrate that
evening we went out and took pictures of me in the middle of a load of traffic:
Everybody loves a long exposure, don't they?
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