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July 9, 2004
The Downside of International Travel: Paying Homage to the Porcelain God
In my life to date, I've been fortunate to travel to forty-some-odd countries. In all of those places, I've managed to avoid getting shot, arrested, robbed, hurt (at least seriously), poisoned, harangued, scourged, kidnapped, hoodwinked (unless you count that sari quilt in Jodhpur), terrorized, converted, sold into slavery, besmirched, sullied or downright made miserable. And up to now, I've avoided getting so sick that I ended up losing my lunch. Until now.
Now, before we go there, we need to back up a bit, all the way back to Tunisia, where I'd spent a week at the WSIS Prepcom meeting. Coming home to Boston, I brought back a bit of a stomach bug with me - call it Tunis Tummy or Carthaginian Cramps or Hannibal's Revenge - but it was more of a minor nuisance than anything else. The only problem is that I had only a week between my Tunisia trip and my Mauritius trip, and I never got the feeling that my stomach was, well, ready for prime time.
After my 30-hour, two-night-and-a-day commute from Boston to Mauritius, I knew I had to take it easy as best I could, which of course was made difficult by the fact that I had less than two hours from the time I arrived at the hotel to the time my meetings commenced. Somehow I managed to stay lucid throughout the first day, blogging and hobnobbing with participants, but I had to call it an early night, climbing into bed around 7pm with a bottle of mineral water, a Kit-Kat bar, and Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday to keep me entertained.
Twelve hours of blissful sleep later, I woke up feeling fresh and had a big breakfast before heading to the morning conference sessions. For some reason I neglected to carry around my bottle of water, so I supplemented my thirst with the copious amounts of grapefruit juice and coffee supplied to the conference by the hotel.
Some time after the second morning session, I started to wonder why it was getting so hot in the plenary room. Then so cold. It was odd; no one else seemed to be bothered. I decided to go check email, which didn't last long, since it was 2am in Boston and no one was eager to send me anything at that time of night. Again I felt the sudden change of temperatures, so I stepped outside to the coffee break area, trying a sip of coffee, then juice, to see which suited me better. Neither seemed quite right; instead I began to feel light-headed.
Sensing the worst, I dragged myself back to the room and stripped off my suit, climbing into bed and setting the alarm for 1pm. My session had been pushed back to late afternoon due to scheduling changes, so hopefully a brief nap would snap me out of this jetlag or whatever the hell it was I was experiencing. Instead, my light-headedness got worse, and I started to feel a bulge in my esophagus. I began to get a little nervous. Rolling over to my side so I wouldn't accidentally die like a drummer from Spinal Tap, I began to wonder if today would be the day the Streak would end. I got my answer a few minutes later.
I had just enough time to run to the bathroom and plunge my head into the toilet before I started getting sick. As I lay there, sucking face with that porcelain whore, for some reason I started to hear music. It was the Spanish Harlem Orchestra performing their mambo hit, "Pueblo Latino." I can't say what song would have been more appropriate for the situation, but my brain's selection struck me as a surprise. If I hadn't been projectile vomiting I would have started laughing.
A few minutes later, I crawled back into bed, resetting the alarm for 2pm. Somehow I needed to get some rest and get this acidic beast out of my system before 4 o'clock, at which point I was scheduled to moderate a plenary session on education technology.
Somehow, almost miraculously, I woke up 90 minutes later feeling okay. Not great, but not terrible either. I took my time getting dressed for the afternoon, in no rush to rejoin the meeting, but eager to do my best to look as if I hadn't spent my lunch hour puking my brains out.
By the time my session started, it'd been pushed back to almost 5 o'clock. The extra time did me good - a little more blogging, a little more bottled water, a little more meditation in the plenary. Fortunately, the session went pretty well; no one seemed to notice any signs of my recent dance with the upchuck goddess. By the time the conference ended at 7pm, I felt I was almost back to normal. I called Susanne for a few minutes to say hello and see how she and the cats were doing, then hung out in the lobby with Shondeep Banerjee of the Commonwealth Business Council. I even made plans with Dave Kisoondayal of the Mauritius Internet Society to spend some time over the weekend seeing the sights of the island. Hopefully I'd get a long night's sleep with no more unexpected mishaps… -andy
Posted by acarvin at July 9, 2004 1:52 AM
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