Misadventures in Airports and Hospitals

I don't even know where to start. On Thursday night, I was sitting in my bungalow on Ko Chang and realized that the next 36 hours leading up to my flight to Korea were probably going to be a bit hectic. But in retrospect, hectic was a GIGANTIC understatement. At some point in the early morning hours of Friday, I was listening to some house music in a bar when a Thai woman stepped on my foot. I kind of pushed her away, and she responded quite angrily and pushed me back. I tried to apologize but she just sort of scowled at me. At the time, I didn't think much of it. A few minutes later, however, I guess in retaliation, a Thai guy came from where the girl was now standing and pushed me. As I gathered what had just happened, he proceeded to smash his beer bottle over the top of my head. I was shocked. There was no pain, but I touched my head and realized that there was blood pouring everywhere. All over my hands. My clothes. Everywhere. Luckily, a few lady-boys had seen the incident and came to my aid, because I might have just stood there bleeding for the rest of the night, thinking to myself, "what the fuck just happened?". One of them spoke pretty good English, gave me a towel for the open wound on my head, and asked if I wanted to see a doctor. Yes, please! Now let's remember that this is happening on a fairly undeveloped Thai island. Ko Chang has neither hospitals nor ambulances. I couldn't have picked a better place to get in my first bar fight. A bartender drove my friend Blake and I in the back of his pickup truck across the island to a local health clinic where there just so happened to be a doctor on shift who spoke good English. I explained what had happened. Doc promptly administered a healthy dose of anesthesia and got to work with his forceps. After picking a few shards of glass out of my head, he stitched five sutures into the back of my head. I am thankful to say I did not feel a thing. I returned to the bar in the same flatbed ambulance that had brought me with a shopping bag full of antibiotics, painkillers, gauze, etc. What a crazy night. They had to shave a patch of my Jew curls off and everything. In fact, I think that's what disappoints me the most.

When we all woke up in the morning, after about 2 hours of sleep, we realized that E had lost her wallet. And we were scheduled to leave the island on a ferry at 9:30 AM to come back to Bangkok. With no time to search, we gave up and just left hurriedly without the wallet. A supposed 5 hour bus ride took 8 hours, and we all arrived back on Khao San road a bit frazzled and confused. After lugging all of our shit through the throngs of backpackers in the streets, we managed to settle down at a wine bar. E checked her e-mail and discovered that her wallet had been found. We took that as a good omen, and after all, it was New Years Eve. We threw our stuff down in a guesthouse and headed out to ring in the New Year in Bangkok. But suddenly, at about 11 PM, E had a medical emergency of her own. With our flight leaving at 7:15 AM, she needed to see a doctor right away. I couldn't party anyway as I was (and continue to be) on all sorts of medications myself due to the aforementioned bottle-smashing incident (please note the masking tape on the side of my head in the photo...ouch), so I accompanied E and we rang in the New Year in style in the waiting room of the Bangkok hospital among nurses, doctors, and the other ill celebrants. But thankfully, there was nothing wrong, and we left the hospital, the second one of my abnormally long day, in one piece.

At around 5 AM, Blake, Danielle, E and I loaded our luggage into a taxi as our semi-drunken cabbie swerved through traffic to get us to the airport. No one had slept, we were all just kind of ready to get on the plane and crash, but of course, Air Asia thought it would be amusing to make me rearrange ALL of the things in my bags to meet their strict weight requirements. They literally had me climb up onto the conveyor belt where you weigh the luggage and reposition things, all the while trying to charge me like $100 in fees that I had already paid online. To say that I received shitty customer service would be giving them too much credit...let's just say I was close to ripping this lady's head off. But alas, we got everything sorted, I paid $40 even though I should have paid nothing, but we had to make the flight. After clearing Thai customs, which are quite slow in themselves, we made the final call for our flight to Kuala Lumpur with about 90 seconds to spare.

On the flight, we had to fill out our immigration forms to enter Malaysia...I came to the question of "occupation", and just wow. There are six options...one of which is Housewife, another of which is Other. Are there that many housewives in the world? This kills me. Anyway, I'm spending New Years day in Thailand, Malaysia, and South Korea - right now I'm in the Kuala Lumpur airport, sipping an iced coffee, enjoying a nice reminder of Westernized life, and just kind of laughing about everything that just happened, everything that's about to happen, basically just everything. I have a gash in the back of my head, I'm headed to Incheon in an hour, I'll be teaching English in less than 48 hours. And it's 2011 now. Just trying to avoid hospitals (and let's not forget gluten) at all costs in the near future.
Life is crazy, but life is good.