The last 24 hours have been something I wish no one would have to endure. It all started as neck, shoulder and head ache, which I accounted to bad ergonomy in the office (still haven’t got a display or a keyboard) and  standing out in the heat (I had to register myself at an office with no aircon). During the evening it got worse, and by the time I was supposed to have dinner it came clear to me that something was wrong besides the usual office worker’s aches: I was dizzy, nauseous, sweaty and, in retrospective, horribly disoriented.

The reason came up – along with my lunch – just before I went to bed. I checked out the symptoms of malaria just in case, but it seems like it was just a regular case of food poisoning.  These things happen quite a lot in here, but this was my first one here. I thought it was all over and went to bed, hoping to wake up safe and sound.

As you probably have guessed already, it didn’t go that well.

I fell asleep relatively quickly, but woke up somewhere in the wee hours of the night with a biblically sore hip bone. It felt like the outermost parts of the bone (the ones on the sides) had been in a screw clamp, pressed inwards by some kilotons of force. The reason turned out to be the rock hard matress in the new bed, combined with my tendency to sleep on my side 90% of the time. I usually sleep on a soft matress that gives way for the protruding bones and distributes my weight more evenly, but these futons and straw thingies just don’t do the trick for me.

So I spent the rest of the night rolling around, sleeping on the couch, lying awake, wandering around the house, trying to sleep, looking for anything soft to sleep on, and missing my loved ones in the dark, hopeless hours of Indian night. What would I have given for being with my wife at that moment!

Eventually morning came, I gave a call to our agent, and he promised to arrange me a softer matress before end of the day. It came in around two o’clock (on a rikshaw), but looks suspiciously similar to the previous one. The coming night will tell if it’s any better.

I had already forgotten how things can suck sometimes.

Tags: accommodation, food, friends and family, oh bugger, sleep, surprises, transportation