Something Frivolous for a Change

For most of the week I am the grubbiest girl you have ever seen. It's currently too cold to shower in Umphium, the refugee camp where I work, so washing is, for now, down to a minimum. The "showers" are bucket showers, performed by scooping incredibly cold water over your body. Actually, once you've gotten started, it's quite refreshing, but being brave enough to start is the hard part. Since it is rainy season, there are certain body parts which it is impossible to clean or keep clean, even directly after showering, most notably, the feet. Footwear generally consists of flip flop sandals or rubber boots, both of which do not lead to clean feet and since we live on a clay mountain side, we spend our days sloshing through and trying not to slip and fall into, the mud.

I am a teacher, so I dress respectably, however I cannot say that refugee camp style is the height of fashion. I wear clothes that are practical and that are usually at least partially covered in mud. My hairstyle is far from chic, either in pigtails or pushed back behind a bandanna. In short, none of this should surprise you, this is the laid back, back-country camping girl that you all know and mostly love.

But this weekend was a little different. This week, after emptying my guts in a variety of toilets around camp, I felt the need for a little tender loving care. So in the company of my good friend and fellow aid worker, Brooke, we declared this to be Mae Sot Spa Weekend.

On Saturday we began our indulgences with iced coffee from the air conditioned haven on Heaven Coffee shop. Then, we spent two hours getting our usual weekend Thai massage. Before you get too jealous you should know that Thai massage does not involve whale music, relaxing and soothing sounds or dimmed mood lighting and scented oils. It is more likely to involve two Thai women arguing loudly above you about whose butt is fatter, yours or the woman next to you. Sometimes the massage is soothing and relaxing, and sometimes it is acutely painful. And it's hard to tell which it is going to be before you begin.

Sunday morning, we began with an early breakfast of Chicken and Rice. All right, it's not luxurious, but there is no fancy breakfast to be had around here and anyone who tries for a Western Style feast is likely to be disappointed. So we stuck with the tried-and-true traditional breakfast and then set off for our facial.

I have never had a facial. Why would I? I don't have $100 to spend on my face when my face seems perfectly fine. But this weekend, we decided to splurge and spend the whole $5 it costs in Mae Sot for an hour worth of luxury.

Surprisingly, here the women were quiet and they turned off the loud Thai pop on the radio for some boy-band-pop from the 80's. I had various cremes, lotions and scrubs put on my face as well as a few machines and masks. In addition, I my face steamed and my nostrils cleaned (although I can't say I was too comfortable with the last). Best of all, my "facial" included a hand and foot massage as well as a brief back and shoulder massage.

Today I am clean, well dressed and I feel like a whole new woman - ready to face another week of cold water and mud!

The Wedding

One day before my elder brother is supposed to get married, he comes up to me and says, "Hey Jen! Want to jump off a bridge?"

"Huh?" I answer, as many people would, I'm sure.

"Come on," he says, "grab a life jacket, we're leaving."

He is being serious, it seems.

The days that led up to Mike's wedding seemed full of moments like that: canoes that went missing on our overnight camping trip, choking on river water as I got sucked into a whirlpool after finally (finally!) jumping off the bridge into the flooded rapids below. Part of it was the ordinary madness that accompanies any wedding. Part of it was the madness that accompanies a wedding involving 100 people in a remote northern fishing location. And part of it is the madness that accompanies my brother and his fiancee - the pair that built a canoe and paddled across the entire country living off dried food they dehydrated themselves and battling with giardia, rapids and the Great White North.

On the day of the wedding, however, the madness seemed to have ended. It was a beautiful day. After my cousins had finished with making me into an almost unrecognizable girl, we headed off to Stanley Mission where the wedding was going to be held.

I got there early as my job involved paddling guests across the water to the old church on an island in big Voyageur canoes. It was a glorious day and my job was a good one. Besides chatting with all the guests, I was out on the water, which was sparkling in the sunlight, looking up towards the white church, and the brilliant blue sky, and the dark green pines along the shore. Everyone was smiling. Everyone was beautiful.

I spent most of the wedding being thankful that I was in the front row, off to the side where no one could see that I was crying. I don't think I have every seen my brother look quite so happy and so radiant. He had eyes for only one person in the church and she couldn't keep her eyes off of his.

My brother is a big guy with a big beard and a big voice, but that day, he sounded like he was about ten years old. I cried the whole time he said his vows and most of the time that she sung hers, in pure joy and celebration of the moment.

The church was just the right size for a hundred people. It is one of the oldest churches in Western Canada, made mostly of wood. As the happy couple exited the church, the brides and grooms (all akilted) raised their canoe paddles into an arch to let them pass. They left the church and went down to the dock where they played a best-of-three rock, paper, sissors to see who got the stern of the canoe (probably the most talked about wedding moment of the summer.) Then they paddled off into the distance.

There was, of course, the inevitable hour or so of photographs, which was passed in the grassy graveyard behind the church. While the bride used her veil to ward off the mosquitos, the boys in kilts were not so lucky. Actually, with the spectacular scenery and the wonderful wedding, even mosquitos could not keep the smiles from our faces.

I got a ride back to land in a motorboat, being relieved of my rowing duties for awhile. As we touched shore, the rain began, just in time for us to get into the car and hit the road.

Dinner was a fabulous affair involving bison, pickrel, wild rice and sweet potatoes. As much as possible, everything had come from local providers. The wine was Canadian and lovely. Every now and again, someone would ring a bell and the couple would kiss.

Someone put me behind the bar, but obviously I didn't stay there long, just long enough to have too much to drink. There was music on and so I had to dance. Almost everyone was on the dancefloor, including the father of the bride and my own parents. My aunt was getting her groove on and there were boys in kilts to dance with and cigars to smoke and people to talk with and entice onto the dancefloor. You can see why I didn't stay behind the bar for very long.

Everything was perfect, as far as I'm concerned, and not having organized it, I am blissfully oblivious to anything that might have gone wrong. The smile on my brother's face and on Ambers, his now wife, was worth every moment of hassle, from the travel agent to the typhoon, just to have been there and seen it and shared the moment with them. The speeches were heart felt, the food divine, the weather gorgeous. I went on a canoe trip, caught a fish, jumped off a bridge and survived to see the wedding, dance the night away, and drive the 13 hours back to Calgary and the 48 hours it took to get back to Bangkok. Never have I been so glad to be with my family and share all the joys and happiness that they bring.

Thanks guys.

Part Eight: When Will it End?

Queen's Birthday:

My bike gets stolen.

45minute walk home in the rain.

What next?

Part Seven: Back in Mae Sot.

I arrived back home at 10pm. My house was full of cobwebs and mould. I took one look at my closet and saw that every single item of clothing I had was infested. The only clothes I could wear, therefor, were the ones I had packed in my carry-on. I had been through most of those already.

I arrived at work the next day, therefor, in a strange combination of clothes, only to find that we would be doing a presentation to our funders, important people from USAID (United States Aid for International Development) were arriving. The presentation went well and I jumped on a truck to get up to the refugee camp to teach that afternoon. I taught and jumped back on the truck to get back to go to dinner and a USAID smooze-fest.

The good news is that it is now official: we have secured funding for the next five years. That means I have a job and a salary and I can hire someone to come here and teach for me so very soon I will only have to do one job instead of two.

And the next morning, I was on a truck again for the hour and a half ride through the mountains to camp. It's rainy season and luckily it seems all the flooding happened when I was away, but our refugee camp in on a hill made of clay, so the whole place is one huge mud pit of fun. This will continue until October.

The moment I stepped foot in my classroom though, I knew, just as I knew the moment I got home to my family, that this whole saga of woe was worth it. My students were so happy to see me and filled me with such great energy that I left camp on Thursday night feeling optimistic and ready to keep on trucking. There are a million things to catch up on, I feel like I've been gone for a month, and so many exciting new developments and things to keep me on my toes and I am loving every second of it. That's good, because I am really not loving the mould or the cobwebs in my house or the place where the cat from next door was sick on my floor god knows how long ago.

But here I am and I still don’t have my bags and my passport and I've just been told the work visa I got in Calgary is invalid anyways, but it's the Queen's Birthday today, so I have a little bit of time to sleep in and rest and that makes the world all that much better. And biking through the vivid green, through the puddles of brown mud, past the buffalo and the rice paddies on my way to work this morning, I know that this is exactly where I want to be right now, evil travel agents and typhoons in Shanghai and all.

Part Six: Deplaning Your Aircraft.

I waited by the baggage carousel with very little hope. I went to the baggage counter almost immediately and had them scan my baggage ticket. "Hmmm…" said the man behind the counter. "I don't have any idea where your bags are."

At least, I thought, he is refreshingly honest.

When we had checked in at Shanghai for the Thai Airways flight, we had been told our bags would likely not make the plane with us, but would be on a following flight and they gave us the number. I told this to the people at the bag counter and they said that the flight would get in at three. It was almost midnight. They would deliver the bags to our hotel, they told us.

I didn't have a hotel. I was supposed to be in Mae Sot already, but I had missed the last bus of the night sorting out my bag situation. Someone suggested I go wait in the waiting lounge of the airport – a hot room with plastic chairs. I almost cried. Another night on a marble floor in an uncomfortable chair.

Instead, I marched up to the China Eastern Airlines office and demanded a hotel room. The woman listened and said, "Sit over there." Twenty minutes later, she had left the office, not having appeared to have done anything for my case. I returned to the counter.

You must understand, strong girl though I may be, lack of sleep is my kryptonite. I had grabbed naps here and there, but I had been in airports for more than fourty-eight hours, in high stress situations, in immigration, and I was fed up. I couldn't bring myself to yell, so I cried.

Actually, I kind of lost it, but the end result was that someone came to pick me up from a nearby airport hotel. They took me downstairs and said they would be back in a second with the airport shuttle. Half an hour later, they hadn't come back.

I went back upstairs, thoroughly exhausted and this time I really lost it. I bawled. The airline man was called and came upstairs again. "I'm sorry," he said. "I forgot you."

I checked into the hotel and the man took my ticket and passport and I was too tired to even think about it. I went upstairs to my bed and slept.

In the morning, my bags had still not arrived, so I availed myself of the hotel buffet and headed out to the bus station to get to Mae Sot. I was half way to Mae Sot when I realized that I had left my passport at the hotel.

Part Five: Your In-Flight Service - Hours Thirty to Fourty-Eight

As I waited, I noticed a few other foreigners waiting with me and the longer we waited, the more passports were added to the pile behind the immigration desk. After half an hour of waiting, I returned to the counter and started asking questions.

It turned out that they were holding our passports and tickets until such time as we had a confirmed booking on an outgoing flight from China. In order to pass immigration, either this or a visa is required. The problem was that no one had contacted our airline to arrange this, so it appeared that we were waiting indefinitely. The sea of people waiting to pass immigration certainly hadn't diminished so it didn't looks as if the immigration officers would be helping us any time soon.

I took matters into my own hands, hoped that my passport and ticket were safe where they were and went looking for China Eastern Airline representatives. I found them near the baggage claim looking harassed and overworked, as I'm sure they were. No one from immigration had notified them. I took a representative back upstairs with me and she collected a stack of about fifty passports and took them into an immigration office. We camped outside the office on the marble floor for the next five hours. There was nowhere else for us to go without our passports.

A group of people transferring to India got taken care of. The people leaving for Hong Kong got their boarding passes. Some guy from IBM came in and yelled a lot. At times it was like watching some twisted reality TV show, watching people come in and out, hearing their flight dilemmas, filling in the blanks where people were speaking Mandarin with our own imaginary subtitles.

Finally, the woman rushed out of the room. "Get your bags, you're leaving now." Our bags? I thought. I have no idea where my bags are. No time to think, we were rushed downstairs and someone put yellow stickers on us. I frantically tried to put my contacts, so I could see and find my bags. One went in, the other went on the floor. Hands dropped as people helped me find it. With one eye, I found my monster bags and a trolley and raced after the other people heading for Bangkok. We had to clear customs, then grab random boarding passes for a Thai Airways flight, then we were racing through security and immigration again and onwards to our boarding lounge.

The flight was called and I boarded and sank into total relaxation in my first class Thai Airways seat upstairs. It had a huge seat, enough leg room, a big pillow and warm blankets. I got a BioTherm bag full of cosmetics and a brush. I had champagne before lift-off and a delightful Cabernet Sauvignon with dinner. The appetizer was a spicy salmon tartar, and I selected a delicious dinner of roast duck with potatoes Lyonnaise and steamed asparagus tips. After dinner there was cappuccino with dessert. I almost wish I could have stayed away to enjoy it more, but I sank into a delicious and much deserved sleep.

It sounds like a happy ending, and I only wish it was.

Part Four: Your In-Flight Service

Typhoon in Shanghai. It made me laugh. I pulled Harry Potter out of my monstrous bags and accepted the food coupon from the check-in desk and then went off to sit in a restaurant with a feeling of relief. At least I had made the flight. My bags were off my hands and I had a real ticket this time and seemed to be going somewhere.

At the bar of the restaurant I chatted with a South African guy who seemed at first pleasant and then annoyingly racist and sexist. At least I had Harry Potter for company.

To my surprise, the flight boarded only a few hours late. Sure, the flight would take eleven hours, but surely the typhoon and resulting weather disturbances wouldn't have cleared away completely by then, I thought.

I thought correctly. After ten hours, the captain announced that we would be landing in Tokyo. Surely, I thought, the typhoon won't clear up in a few hours.

I thought correctly. We sat on the tarmac for a few hours until the airport closed. Then we were told because the airport was closed, there was no ground crew to unload us so we could neither take-off nor get off the plane. We stayed there for a further nine hours.

Finally, we were on our way to Shanghai. "I don't even want to go to Shanghai!" I kept thinking. I had missed my flight to Bangkok and didn't relish the madness I imagined would be going on in Shanghai with all the flights rescheduled and people stuck and bags most likely lost. But onwards to Shanghai we went and there we arrived in due course, after being on the same airplane for more than THIRTY hours.

But, I thought, I am nearing the end of my saga. And, as I had had that thought many a time in the previous two weeks, this time also, I was wrong. There was more to come.

We tottered off the plane, a smelly, zombie-like crew, ecstatic for clean air and a place to stretch our legs. We were herded towards Chinese immigration. In the long, long line before I reached the counter, I struck up conversations with some people from India and a guy from China.

"Why is this taking so long?" I asked, noticing that each immigration official seemed to be taking a very long time with each passport.

"They are like that here," my Chinese-Canadian friend said. "They don't care. They are looking for anti-Communist infiltrators. Mostly it is people with Taiwanese passports. They take them away for interrogation."

"Oh," I said.

I had been away from work for two weeks. In Canada, I had put all thoughts of Burma and Mae Sot from my mind, fully enjoying my vacation and my time with my family. I had forgotten all the politics of immigration and deportation and interrogation. I had forgotten how often I lie to immigration and government officials about my work. I had forgotten that I once worked in Taiwan and am currently engaged in work which is considered subversive to the government of Myanmar, who is a good friend with the government of China, which is the country in which I currently found myself. All those stamps in my passport were going to get me in trouble again, I thought.

I stepped up to the counter when my turn came with the cheeriest, ditziest, most non-subversive smile I could think of. But the official never looked at me. He looked at my passport and he looked at my ticket and then he said, "Wait over there."

He kept my ticket and passport behind the counter. What choice did I have?

Part Three: Boarding Time.

Coming home to Canada was definitely worth every penny, every tear and every bit of sleepless stressed out flight minutes home. But the story of the wedding and how beautiful it was is a story for another day. For now we will continue with the endless saga of woe.

In Calgary, I notified the embassy of the theiving travel agent who had in fact abandoned shop and hit the highway. His shop in Bangkok is now a backpacking store. I applied for a Thai work visa, I met friends, and I received a very generous donation of two boxes of books for my school in Umphium, which made my bags coming back to Bangkok even more monstrous than they had ever been before. Both of them weighed over eighty pounds. In Calgary, I also bought another one-way ticket back to Bangkok. This time I was with China Eastern Airlines, going through Shanghai. Last minute, non-refundable, no changes permissible. "You better catch that flight," I thought to myself.

Before flying out of Vancouver to return to work, I visited a friend on Vancouver Island, a one and a half hour ferry ride from Vancouver. I left my bags in the airport and I spent the afternoon with her out at a lake, swimming and basking in the sun and losing my glasses in the bottom of the lake.

Luckily, I had contacts with me and an extra pair of glasses somewhere in my monstrous bags.

"I should be on the eight o'clock ferry," I thought. "Or probably the nine o'clock." But we made our travel plans late at night when both me and my friend who would be driving me were feeling tired, so we settled on the ten o'clock ferry.

We arrived at the ferry terminal at nine fifty-five. "One ticket, please," I said, panting a little from the run in from the car.

"Sorry," the woman at the counter said. "We don't start selling tickets for another ten minutes." I looked blank. "We don't start selling tickets for the eleven o'clock ferry until after ten o'clock."

I panicked but there was nothing to be done. The gangway between shore and boat was already going up. We had missed the ferry. I sat with my friend in the terminal. If I missed this flight, that was it. No changes, no rescheduling, no refund. Just ANOTHER ticket I would have to swallow and buy again. We called the airline, only to get a chirpy recording telling me that there were no changes and the flight was on time. We made calculations. I could still make it, if the ferry was on time (they often aren't) and if there was no traffic and if security wasn't taking a long time…

It was a long hour to wait for the ferry. I ate chocolate like a madwoman. It was a long hour and a half on the ferry. It was a long half hour ride to the airport.

I tore out of the bus and raced through the airport down to the baggage check where I had left the monster bags. I loaded them precariously onto a trolley and then barreled my way through two terminals to get to my check in counter, resisting the urge to swear at old ladies and slow movers and almost toppling a family of five.

Covered in sweat, I pulled up ahead of the China Eastern counter and found my ticket. I looked up to see a big sign:

Typhoon in Shanghai. Flights Delayed.

Part Two: Your Pre-Flight Boarding Call

In the morning most of my swelling had gone down and my trip out to the bus station to pick up my bags went smoothly. I wasn't as early at the airport as I would have liked to have been, but I got there with plenty of time to spare.

At the Cathay Pacific counter I hauled my bag up on the scale and brought out my passport. "My name is Jennifer Jones," I said. "I'm on the ten fifty flight to Hong Kong and Vancouver."

"Hmmmm," said the airline agent. "I don't seem to have you on my system."

"Well," I said helpfully, "here is my confirmation number. Does that help?"

The agent looked thoughtful and then called her manager. "Aha!" I thought. "They have made a mistake. Perhaps they overbooked the plane. Perhaps they are upgrading me to first class."

When she got off the phone, I discovered that quite the contrary to being upgraded, I didn't have a ticket at all. My travel agent, she explained, had never given the airline payment for the booking, so the airline had "washed" the booking from their system. Not only did I not have a flight, but the flight was booked and completely full. "Call your travel agent," she said. "They probably just forgot to pay."

It's Sunday, I thought. What kind of travel agent works on Sunday? So with an hour and a half before flight time, I rushed to the phones and started making phone calls. The shop had two numbers and I had the personal cell phone of the travel agent. His name is Waiphot and he was recommended to me by my good friend Mel who had been using him for two years. In fact, she had even left her stuff at his place for a few months in storage while she had gone travelling awhile ago.

The cell phone rang busy. The shop never answered. I called Mel. "That's strange," she said. "The shop is open on Sunday and there is always someone there."

I returned to the check-in counter. "Get me on this flight."

There were three other people flying stand-by ahead of me. I had to wait another fifteen minutes. A seat became available. I had to go to another counter to pay for it. The flight was boarding and they hadn't even checked my bags in yet. They showed me the bill. It was twice what I had paid for the round-trip ticket and would only get me one-way home to Canada. I closed my tearing eyes and said, "Do it."

Ticket in hand, I ran for security only to get stopped. Damned airport tax. There was a line up. "Please," I begged. "My flight leaves in fifteen minutes, could I…"

"Mine too," barked the man in front. "Hey, baby, give me my wallet will you?"

The man behind him let me in. I paid and hit security. Luckily security in Thailand is nothing like most countries. It took less than five minutes. I ran towards my gate, boarded the plane and sat down. I had made it.

Part One: Leaving on a Jet Plane

My send off from Mae Sot in no way hinted the arduous saga my journey home was to become. I packed my bag full of presents for my brother's wedding, and slung it onto my back and walked down the street to the hot-pot restaurant. All my friends came to see me off despite the rain. We sat around laughing and drinking wine and gin (real treats for us in Mae Sot) and eating large quantities of ice cream from the buffet bar. A friend gave me a ride on a motorcycle to the bus and then I was settled in comfortably under my blanket, speeding through the wet night on my way to Bangkok.

As comfortably as one may be settled in, it is almost impossible to get a good night's sleep on an overnight bus. I arrived in the Northern Bus Terminal just after five in the morning on Saturday feeling excited and ready for adventure. I hauled my bags off the bus and trucked them over to the Departures terminal where there is a place to check in your bags overnight for a small fee. The airport not being far from the bus terminal, my plan was to pick them up there the next day on the way to the airport.

I spent five minutes rooting around in my handbag before I realized that I didn't have my wallet.

I tore through all my bags looking for it, but it was gone.

Where was my wallet? Had someone lifted it from my purse on my way to the Departures terminal or had I left it on the bus?

I desperately tried miming my situation to the woman checking bags. My Thai is enough for me to get a good meal and a hotel room, but certainly can't deal with, "I've left my wallet on the bus, I'll be right back and can pay you in a minute." The woman just gave me a look of disgust and moved my bags out of her way. "But you can't do this!" I thought. "You have to help me! You have to be nice!"

There wasn't much to be done. I couldn't go tearing around the large bus complex on a wallet finding mission with my monster of a bag. I moved it as close to the other bags as I could and set off.

The bus, of course, had already gone. At information they kept asking me, "Where do you want to go?" The security guards kept asking, "Where is your ticket?"

My ticket, of course, was in my wallet. My wallet was (I hoped) on the bus. The bus belonged to a bus company and I didn't know which one, nor could I consult my ticket to find out. All I knew was that it started with a "C" and was a fairly long Thai name that I couldn't hope to pronounce, let alone remember.

Someone said one name and it sounded right so I went with it. I had to come back in at seven when their office opened. I went back and slept with my bags, enduring more dirty looks from the baggage ladies. At seven I went to the offices. No one was there. Another Thai woman in purple came over to "help" me. She kept asking me questions in Thai, which I tried to field in Mime and she kept cutting me off to yell at me.
I started to cry.

Just a little and not because of my wallet so much as because I hadn't slept enough and I was stressed out and this lady was screaming something incomprehensible in my face. Finally a lady behind a ticket window beckoned me over and got on a phone. Actually, at one point she had two phones going, plus her cell phone, plus she was issuing tickets to customers. Quite frankly I had never seen anyone in Thailand quite so busy. She was a superhero of efficiency. Finally, she handed me a piece of paper and told me to give it to a cab driver.

There I was at the Northern Bus Terminal with not even enough baht to my name to use the washroom, and no plastic and this stranger writes something in Thai and tells me to get into a cab. If she's wrong, or misunderstood or if someone has already found and emptied my wallet, I can't even pay the driver, but what else can I do? I hail the cab and jump in.

The cab takes me to the company's bus depot where a smiling man greets me and waves me enthusiastically over to the bus. There, under my seat, is my wallet, untouched and full of cash.

The great thing about misfortunes, I think, thankful that my stupidity has not been badly punished this time around, is that misfortune illuminates the glory of the every day. Suddenly, I feel blessed and my whole day sparkles with my extraordinary luck. I'm still tired and emotionally drained, but I am full of well being and can't stop smiling.

I return to the terminal and check in my bags. I hop on a city bus over to the weekend market and sit in the first booth I can find to order an iced coffee. From my stool, the whole day looks beautiful. I watch the booths open, people set up, a slow trickle of shoppers come in.

The Chatuchak Weekend Market is one of the inexhaustible wonders of Bangkok. Everything is for sale there from pure bred puppies to kitchen ware. If you went every weekend, I still doubt that you would exhaust the place. Designer clothing, decorations, magic amulets, antiques, furniture, pottery, incense, jewelry, food, beer, snakes, slippers… you name it, it's probably there. By far the greatest challenge, however, will be finding it amidst the warren of stalls and booths and small shops and crowded lanes full of shoppers.

I spent my morning there and my afternoon catching up on my sleep in a small hotel room in the city. In the evening I wandered through another night market, had dinner on the street and then went to sample some of the nightlife. I ended up dancing the night away in a tightly packed club with fabulous music.

Bangkok clubs close at two. About fifteen minutes before close, something curious started to happen. My fingers felt fat and funny, my head started to itch. By the time I got outside, I had to take my ring off because I was afraid it would cut the circulation off in my hand. Welts were forming on my arms and neck.
I had hives.

For those of you without allergies, I wouldn't wish this on any of you. Hives are probably one of the lesser allergic reactions (I'd definitely pick it over anaphylactic shock any day) but that doesn't make them any less miserable. Your whole body breaks out into large swollen welts, like oversized mosquito bites. Everything swells. I couldn't make a fist with my hands they were so fat. The temptation to scratch is enormous and even when I succeed in resisting, my body twitches involuntarily with the itch. In addition, a queasiness takes over, the faint feeling that you will vomit. In short, it feels as if your body has been taken over by a swarm of infected itchy bees.

This is not the first time I've had hives in Bangkok. I'd love to know what causes it. At that moment, all I cared about, however, was finding my drugs and kicking them back. A happy side effect of allergy drugs is that they induce sleepiness, so very soon after returning to my hotel, I had left my itchy body behind and fallen into my dreams. I didn't hear the usual night noises, the cats and the dogs and the rain on the roof and the noisy neighbors. All I heard in the morning was my alarm waking me up to send me on my way to the airport where I would head off for Canada and my brother's wedding.