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RE: Banged up in an Indian hospital!
Hey, great to some new stuff from you! I hope the teaching training is going well!
Another great story. The 2nd person point of view worked quite well here. I'd say you pulled it off nicely. Do not envy you at all for that experience.
I was lucky enough never to be hospitalized or even properly sick during my travels. I had a motorbike accident once, but I'm grateful to say that I came out with only some missing skin. I was once at a place where other people were dropping like flies, with days of diarrhea and vomiting, from the same food that I ate. But somehow I got away with nothing more than a couple of hours of stomach pain.
I'm glad you were alright in the end!
I don't think I can use 2nd person all the time, but it definitely adds a different element to the right story. I think it incites a bit more empathy, perhaps, having the reader imagine themselves in a situation that is somewhat relatable, even if they've never experienced it themselves.
My timeline is a bit whacked out as far as these blog posts are going, but essentially I picked up the diarrhea the day I left Hampi for Goa, got some Imodium for it in Mumbai, and then once the Imodium ran out it came back with a vengeance in Udaipur. After this, I was a lot more careful with what I ate, and by that I mean no street food and I went to McDonald's more often, because while it's shit food, at least it is handled to a certain globally acceptable standard. I also stayed for a week with some friends in a Sikh town in the north of the country, and they fed me a lot of home-cooked dahl, although that gave me painful wind.
Motorcycle crashes are one of the other very common traveller's misadventures, along with the bus crashes and the food poisoning. I always groaned when people warned me that I'd get kidnapped or killed in Pakistan (spoiler alert: Pakistanis are the nicest people I've ever met), and I'd try to explain to them that I was much more likely to die from bad food or bad roads. But fear of violence is so ingrained in our psyche now that it's hard to get people off of that. Glad you got away with only minor injuries. One of my friends has just had a crash in Vietnam and done some more serious damage to her leg, but she's still riding around the country having a blast nonetheless.
Yes, there's a reason the 2nd person is used very infrequently. It can be a tricky one to pull off. But you chose the right story for it.
To be honest, in Asia I trusted street food more than restaurants. The reason is that on the street you get to see them making the food, and if it's a popular vendor you know the food must be relatively fresh as they have a high turnover rate. Restaurants, on the other hand, usually do the cooking in a back room, and they have the capacity to store a large quantity of food, so it is not necessarily fresh. McDonalds is different though, as you said, and I can certainly understand being careful after such an experience!
Actually the reason so many people get Montezuma's revenge when traveling is because of the different microorganisms present in different regions. It can even happen at 5 star resorts. India seems to have some nastier than average bugs, though. Africa too. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that, ironically, the best way to protect yourself from getting diarrhea is by getting diarrhea. Once you've had it and recovered, your body has adapted to the new microorganisms and there is much less chance of getting it again (of course it can and does still happen, but the chances are lower).
I agree about the sources of danger. Bad roads especially (and of course the crazy drivers inhabiting them). The thing is that stories of westerners getting kidnapped or killed catch a lot of media interest and go viral, so if it happens once or twice, people think it's a common occurrence. But nobody talks about how many people die from the food or from accidents. It's really a shame that the media operates as it does, but of course it's the people's fault. We love drama.
That was actually my initial rationale before I arrived in India, although it proved not to be the case there - the restaurants were usually much cleaner than the street food stalls, with even the popular ones often very fly blown and visually quite grotty. Hygiene really is a very major issue in India. A meal in a restaurant would cost me about €3, compared to the 50 cents or so for street food. I was happy to wear the difference. It's a shame, because you get some delightful street food there, flavour-wise.
After this particular run-in, I did handle everything I ate very well, even as I moved into other countries. I was also pretty mindful of building up my tolerance, initially only drinking and brushing my teeth with bottled water, before moving on to drinking filtered water and brushing my teeth with tap water. Bottled water is an environmental disaster.
You're right about loving drama. I don't know what your musical taste is like, and I'm sure you've figured by now that mine is quite eclectic, but I'll leave this here.
Interesting. I guess things do work a bit differently there!
Thanks for the video. Not entirely sure what to make of it as I couldn't understand the words, and the closed captioning didn't seem to work. But interesting visuals to be sure! It's not my usual cup of tea, but I didn't mind it. I don't have well defined music taste, except that I'm a big fan of classic rock and I dislike rap and country. Mostly I'm just inexperienced. I've never explored most of the genres out there.
It's a song by Tool, a rock band from the US. Their lyrics and the soundscapes they produce are very cerebral. This is far from their best work, but the lyrics are relevant here. The song starts with:
And then a little later in the song:
Ah, thanks for that! Now I understand. :-) Definitely relevant and smart lyrics.