Japan 6 - 8am Tokyo time
This morning when I woke up my stomach felt like a bag of snakes. If I was Bruno I would head outside and eat some grass. Daniela blames it on the beer – but three bottles seems a little light to cause such ill-effects. The view from our hotel indicates rain. We are fully packed and I have managed to fully unpack my digestive system in the mean time.
My guess is it was the large amount of fried greens with chilies we ate at a small resto just a stones throw from our hotel – it was filled with Japanese business men drinking rice wine mixed with a cold beer called Hoppy. It could be any number of things but I doubt it is serious. We tried to enter a large garden yesterday morning but it was closed due to an outbreak of mosquitos carrying Dengue fever.
Dengue Fever Symptoms and Signs. Primary symptoms of dengue appear three to 15 days after the mosquito bite and include high fever and severe headache, with severe pain behind the eyes that is apparent when trying to move the eyes. Other associated symptoms are joint pain, muscle and bone pain, rash, and mild bleeding.
Oh I doubt very much this is a case of Dengue fever but it sure adds to the dramatic effect of it all no? The people at the park were all dressed in these uniforms with white helmets and rubber boots. When we walked up to the entrance a stout and somewhat tall man crossed his arms in an X shape and formally shouted “we croezed.” All the while Japanese senior citizens meandered in around us with wrinkled newspapers under their arms.
So this morning we are off to a bit of a rough start.
Daniela keeps going on about how the room smells of urine this am. She just asked me in all seriousness if I woke up in the middle of the night and “pissed somewhere” Like I am some kind of animal. Who knows maybe I did but I can’t seem to find any wet spots on the carpet.
Daniela spends most of her time eating and sampling small cakes and pastries wrapped in cellophane. There is a 7-11 just a few doors down and she harvests these tiny one-dollar pancake-shaped, cream or jam-filled, round, square, tan, and white bites in droves. Her morning routine has been red bean-filled shapes of such pastries and cups of hot green tea.
This morning she has kept things out of view as she can hear my stomach churning in the silence of the hotel room in between my keyboard clicking. Nausea has been paramount for me so far today and I have spent the last half hour biding my time to see how I might fare in the world today before we venture out with our tump lines and traverses of luggage. For the most part I watched Daniela pack everything up this am while I experienced a general malaise of the likes that you know are intense but will pass.
Currently I feel better and I am just about to announce to her we can get moving. The show must go on and luckily there are washrooms everywhere here – I call them car-washes for humans because you can pretty much clean everything in them to a spit-shine. Yes time to get moving, I think Daniela is out of cakes.
