Sawadeekrab

I’m back from Bangkok. The last time I was in Bangkok was when there was a Tsunami, so I’m just thoroughly disappointed in the fact that no natural disasters have occurred this time.

The first day, we spent lying around in the hotel and eating in the hotel. This trip has mostly been a quest in finding the best pad thai in the world, so I was eating pad thai everyday for 4 days. I even had pad thai for breakfast.

I didn’t find the best pad thai in the world, but Thailand people (Thailandians?) have the best malls ever. They have a mini Ocean Park in their BASEMENT. Just hidden under the mall, they have tanks with sharks in them. It’s like you and your friends go grab frozen yoghurts at the ice cream shop, then all of a sudden, you’d be like, “Hey! Let’s go feed the sharks and look at the jelly fishes in Ocean World!” But then again, if you’re American, you’re probably going to point out how you guys have ‘Mall of America’ and how there are roller coasters right next to Starbucks.

In the evening, I was watching chick flicks on HBO and this guy comes knocking at the door. My mom is busy in the toilet (she kind of spends half her life in there) and my dad is at the spa, so I get the door. He’s carrying a trolley and he’s asking me something in English or Thailandnese, I don’t know what he was saying anyway. After about 5 minutes of me standing there clueless and going “What?”, he hands me a Daily Activity sheet. Then he asks, “Do you want any ice?” He literally gets a tub of ice out of his trolley and shows me these ice cubes. I just didn’t get it, because what would I want ice for? The first thought that came to mind was maybe the aircons broke, but the A/C was on alright so I say, “For what?” He doesn’t get it so he just keeps trying to hand me this tub of ice and I’m like no thanks. Then he smiles and says okay and I shut the door in the face before he asks if I want his kidney or something.

The day we leave, I’m going through customs and all that. They have a metal detector you have to go through in case you’re carrying weapons. The thing has almost never beeped on me, ever. But it’s still kind of intimidating to be walking through there in case it starts beeping and the police jumps on you for being some kind of terrorist. I walk through, then this thing starts beeping on me. The security looks at me all suspicious-like and tells me to go through again. I go through again and it still beeps. Now they tell me to take off my shoes and go through again. I take off my shoes and it still goes on beeping at me. I feel like I’m in Harold & Kumar.

Eventually they let me go because I’m not a ‘threat’ and they didn’t find anything on me. My mom is laughing and it’s hypocritical of her since she’s been searched loads of times for carrying nail clippers. One time she winked at me because my dad was being searched and they found nail clippers, but my mom was also carrying nail clippers but they didn’t find any in her bag. A fat black woman comes over and tells her to come over to the side. Apparently you’re not supposed to wink at people in the airport, or you could be a terrorizer. The woman frisks her and finds nothing, but gives her the eye anyway. Afterwards my mom was like, “I can’t believe they were manhandling me like that, do I look terrorizing to you?” I was like, “No, maybe she just wanted to feel you up.”

Got Swine?

I’m basically living off congee, apple sauce and honey water right now because I have a flu. On Sunday, I was blowing my nose all over the place and hanging around in bed, watching Adventureland on my iPhone. Then all of a sudden, I get a 101F fever. I thought that Swine Flu was like one of those myths the media tell you to get you to cover your face with a mask. The only people dying from swine flu right now are those kids with diabetes or old women with chronic lung cancer. I think I have chronic fatigue so I could be sleeping in the bed on Sunday then wake up on Monday, only to find out that I’m dead and that the news is announcing my death: “14 year old kid dies of swine flu, has chronic fatigue.”

So at this point, I’m calling my mom to save my life and she goes call my dad, who is taking a nap. My dad eventually wakes up 10 minutes later with a bed head and we all go to this private hospital together. When I get into the hospital, this cleaning lady hands me a mask and tells us to wait in line. There’s a bunch of sick people coughing on the sofa, some people look like they’re dying and some people looking like film stars with big sunglasses and rainbow flip flops.

Thirty minutes later, sitting on the sofa and feeling like crap, the nurse tells us to go to the reception and SIGN IN. I waited 30 minutes just to sign in? Aren’t you supposed to do that stuff, like, when you get in the hospital? Then after the nurse punches our names into the computer, she goes, “Yeah, the line is pretty busy right now, so you’re going to have to wait around 2 hours.” OK so I’m just thinking, if I accidentally get swallowed by an elephant and I’m hanging out in the said elephant’s uterus, she’s just going to make me wait there for 2 hours before they get a doctor to get a butter knife and cut me out of there? And I’m in a private hospital, so isn’t there supposed to be a shorter wait time?

Then an hour later, they call me over to check my temperature. The male nurse says that I have a fever. No duh. He asks questions like whether I’ve been out of the country. Then my dad goes and blurts out stuff like how my school has people with swine flu and my math tutor has swine flu too. I decide to play along and make things seem more serious by saying that I’ve closely “interacted” with these said swine flu diagnosed people. The male nurse makes this serious face, which looks more like a gay face. Then he says that he has to take us to a clean room. And my mom is like “WATS DAT?” and he says it’s basically a room that’s clean. So she’s like OH OK.

When we go into the room, I discover that the clean room is basically a rectangular room with 2 chairs, a rubbish bin that can’t close, a sink and a box of tissue papers. There’s a huge window where nurses can see what you’re up to (darn can’t eat snicker bars in there!) and it feels like you’re fish in a tank. My dad sits on one of the chairs and starts watching House on his iPhone with the speakers on loud (watching House in a clean room is a memorable experience on his part). Thirty minutes later, the nurse comes in with this doctor who looks like a freaking intern. He’s like “So what’s wrong?” and I tell him about the fever, the coughing, sore throat and flu in general. My mom asks what the temperature was when they took it just now. He says that it was 39.6 Celsius. I ask what that is in Fahrenheit, since we use F instead of C and his response was: “I don’t know.”

After a bit of routine check ups he says that there’s a 50% chance that I have swine flu, so he tells us to do the test. Then ANOTHER 30 minutes later, the nurse starts dressing up in her gear - the hairnet, green robe and all that enchilada. Then she comes in with, what looked like a long Q-tip. She says “So I’m going to stick this up your nose, it’s going to hurt.” I’m just like I didn’t intend for my weekend to end up in a chair having a long Q-tip stuck up my nose like that troll in Philosopher’s Stone. She sticks it up both of my noses and it really does hurt, she wasn’t exaggerating or anything. When she took it out, I sneezed about like 10 times and the nurse was laughing. Fml.

She tells us to wait ANOTHER HOUR before the tests come out. After waiting another hour on the sofa, wrapped in a jacket. We get the tests back and it turns out that I’m negative for swine flu. The doctor probably lied about the 50/50 thing since the test costed 400 HKD. I didn’t know whether that was good news at the moment since it was basically a waste of time to begin with. Then the doctor writes me a 2 day sick leave (who gives 2 days sick leave for a possible swine flu patient? I got like a 3 day sick leave once because I was dizzy). Then he tells us to collect the medicine which took another thirty minutes.

Basically, we went in at 6:30 and came out at 10:30 so yeah. A total of 4 hours for nothing. Health care sucks. And yeah I realize how long this blog is and how you’d rather watch Obama talk about health care reform. I’m expecting the zero comments because of people freaking out by the amount of words they have to read and whining “NOO ITS LIKE ENGLISH CLASS ALL OVER AGAIN.”

To Infinity and Beyond

I haven’t blogged in 12 days so I will sum up that during these 12 days, I have encountered many things that will blow your mind. Like last week, I had to accompany a sick girl to the nurse room and then encountered this kid who was puking his guts out. His puke resembled the likeness of marmalade and beef curry. This tells the story of how the girl accompanying the sick girl got sick. I got my Science test back a few days ago and got an incomprehensible question correct and that question required math skills, of which I lack. When I saw that I got it right, I was just sitting there, dazed, trying to recall how I got the question right because I honestly had no idea. So I was just like “I’m a GENIUS.” Because I was the only one in my class who got it right on a whim.

Yesterday, people kept stealing my food and drinking my Vitasoy. I don’t get the whole concept of sharing a drink with random people, not random people, but your friends or people in your school. Has anyone heard of the SWINE FLU EPIDEMIC? You don’t go leaving saliva over people’s drinks and then giving it to someone else then giving it to some other dude and then give it back to the rightful owner.

Then just this morning, I woke up at 9:30 and I thought that I woke up too early so I started playing Pokemon Platinum on my NDS while lying on the bed but I was pissed off by the random encounters and I got myself stuck in that cave on Victory Road to the path of the Pokemon League. I’m going to meet the Elite Four, eventually. I don’t really get it though since I didn’t get stuck in a cave when I was playing Pearl. I think I need walkthroughs. When I was five, I was playing Pokemon Ruby on a GBA and got stuck after three gyms so I think, for the sake of the children, they should make these games easier for the gaming impaired.

I have a load of homework I have to do, the worse part is the 3D poster (where you have to get a load of styrofoam balls, wood, leaves all that other junk) and make a diagram of a cell pop out of the paper. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS IMAGE?