I'm not quite sure whether I'm all right. My nose has been running for over a month now. I keep saying that I'm carrying a cold, but that's probably not quite correct. I don't have a cold anymore, just a nose that produces enough mucus for a nightly Jungle Camp slime wrestling match and a cough that tries the same with less success.
From time to time my head hurts as if I weren't hydrated enough. This might have something to do with all the minerals that I lose through my nose and throat. Isostar is my fix of choice for this, but I don't take it with me when I'm traveling. Normally I don't have headaches. In fact, I never have headaches. It's just something I don't do. Now I also tire easily. Something's amiss.
It would be easy blame all these little inconveniences on the cancer but that would not be consistent with my approach of ignoring it. Denying reality is something I'm quite good at. I think it works in my favor here. But how do I explain the niggling pains and aches? Better not think about them. Let's continue as if the trip to Thailand were the most important thing.
The dust in the air turned the end of the day into quite a spectacle. It wasn't so much night falling as day disappearing. It didn't get much darker but visibility dropped until I could see only my immediate surroundings and a featureless infinity of polluted air. Dusk just hung there, becoming ever more impenetrable. The lights all around produced a ghastly yellow as they scattered on millions of tiny particles. For a good ten minutes, it felt as if we were heading straight into the apocalypse.
The driver who took me from the synchrotron to Bangkok was having a bit of an off-day. He drove like a champion to the outskirts of the capital and fearlessly cut into the menacing dusk, but as he got close to my destination, he completely lost the plot. After crossing a mighty bridge a mere 15 minutes from the university I was headed to, he took off into the wrong direction, and nothing I said, increasingly pleadingly, made him reconsider.
By the time we had connected, we were almost stuck in the marshes and close to the end of the road. In another context and another country, this could have been a scary experience, evoking images of tourists dropped by the wayside, beat up and robbed. In Thailand, there is nothing to worry about, especially inside the vehicle of an upscale local hotel chain.
Nothing, that is, except arriving. The university was now twenty minutes farther away than when we had crossed the bridge. Without my phone and its navigational capabilities, we would probably have remained stranded in an ignored corner of Bangkok, by the river, out of ideas, and far away from a bed for the night.
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