I prefer bad news first

Originally posted on Jan 5 2007 on my Friendster blog.

To one and all: A belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I'm ba-ack...

Zipping back and forth between Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangdong, Macau, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and good 'ol JB.

Living out of a suitcase for 3 weeks. *shock horror* (oi, I am a girl after all)

Hotel food. *yuck*

Airline food. *double yuck*

Falling sick while on holiday and far, far away from home. *triple yuck and a long, drawn-out groan* (even if it was entirely my own fault)

Big sigh. Where do I start?

At the beginnning. D-uh.

I arrived in HK international airport hale and hearty, eager to be off and experience all that the bright city has to offer. We were greeted by a less-than-enthusiastic local tour-guide, herded into a mini-bus and unloaded at our hotel for the night (Stanford Hotel). Our tour leader (the one that had accompanied us from Malaysia) was busy checking us in and the rest of the group was just milling around, being touristy.

That was when I felt it.

An itch around my eyes. I blinked a few times and hurriedly checked my reflection in the mirrors of the hotel lobby.

Drat. The area around my eyes was swollen. Just slightly, but noticable to me.

My first thought was to list the things I most recently ate or drank (only an allergic reaction can cause my eyes to swell). I'm allergic to certain antibiotics, pearl powder and some of the harsher cleaning agents but was pretty sure I had not come into contact with those. What could it be?
I arrived at the answer via the process of elimination. It wasn't food, drink, shampoo, detergent, dust or anything like that. Yet, it was the one thing I couldn't avoid and the one thing I could do nothing about.

It was the dratted air pollution. Drat, drat drat drat DRAT!

There was nothing to I could do but suffer in silence. I woke up the next day to the sight of my eyes grotesquely swollen, with dead skin flaking off the swollen areas and purplish-grey shadows under my eyes. Of course, I looked into the mirror and freaked myself out. Then I proceeded to freak my roommate (the tour-leader) out.

I ran around looking like that for the whole trip save the last 2 days when my eyes finally adapted to the level of air pollution. That should probably explain the lack of photos with me in the frame. My tour group didn't help either by gawking at me every morning and coming up to me separately to ask what the matter was. I think they did that just so they could get a closer look at what looked like spectacular purple-red-grey slugs living under my eyeballs. Hmph.
But then again, my swollen eyes were just a trifling inconvenience. I did get properly sick after all.

A trip to HK Disneyland was planned for the first morning in HK. While waiting for the minibus to be brought round, someone in the group suggested we go buy some biscuits and snacks at 7-11 to bring along to Disneyland as food (and everything else) there was notoriously expensive. I bought two buns, stuck them in my sling-bag and promptly forgot about them.
Five (5!) days later, we were in the bus, late for dinner and I was feeling hungry. Suddenly I remembered that I had food in my bag. Feeling quite happy with myself, I took out a rather flattened bun and ate it. It had cheese on it and tasted quite good, actually.

That night, I awoke at 3 am, 4.30am and 5am with feelings of vague discomfort in my stomach. It felt heavy, like I had eaten a bit too much but otherwise I didn't feel unwell so I managed to fall back asleep all those times. At 6am when my alarm went off, I woke up, dashed to the bathroom and puked my guts out. It was only as I was contemplating the green veggies swimming in the toilet bowl that I realised that it wasn't all that smart of me to happily eat a 5 day old cheese bun, however nice it tasted.

All up, I puked twice that day and came down with a high fever. What amazed me was that the whole day I only had 4 glasses of tea and half a bowl of fishball noodles and didn't feel hungry.

Hmm, maybe I should eat more 5 day old cheesy buns.