My Angel

My angel of the day is hotjaga. I got some kind of mild (thank goodness) food poisoning in Semarang on Saturday morning at breakfast. I ate Padang food, which is usually fairly sketchy because they leave the food sitting out in dishes all day long and people come and just help themselves to however much they want. However, the restaurant I ate at was in the mall (seemed more upscale than someplace on the sidewalk), had just opened 30 minutes prior to my eating there (so the food should have been fresh), and I did not eat any of the meat (I never eat meat, on principle, at Padang restaurants). But shortly after, I was watching Rise of Return of the Apes with some friends, and as is my habit in movie theaters, I fell asleep halfway through. But I jerked awake at some point near the end of the movie when I felt my entire breakfast coming up. Luckily, I managed to keep it down. And then I (barely) managed to keep it down through the next 2 malls as well. Unfortunately, my heart was RACING, I was super hot and sweaty even in the AC, and I was dizzy and ended up sitting on the cool tile floors of most stores we went into, much to the amusement of many Indonesian people. The motorbike ride home helped a lot with all the air blowing on me and because I was able to sit down rather than stand. But by the time I got home, I felt pretty miserable and went to bed at 8:30 after making sure an ample amount of lights in my apartment were left on just in case any emergency dashes to the bathroom were necessary.

Thank goodness no dashes were required. I slept soundly for nearly 12 hours but woke up Sunday morning late for church and still feeling pretty miserable. As long as I laid down, I was fine, but as soon as I stood up, I was sweating and dizzy. So that seemed like a pretty good excuse to stay in bed all day, reading Agatha Christie and watching movies. Aswan came over in the afternoon and helped me realize that I hadn't eaten anything since 10:30 the morning before and that I should probably get something in me. We discussed our options, which at that hour mostly included fried things. I finally decided I wanted soup, so he went to the market for me to buy garlic, carrots, potatoes, shallots and celery. I heated it up with some rice in some turkey stock I froze after Thanksgiving last year (I KNEW that would come in handy someday) and ate a little of that. I felt a little better.

This morning I was still feeling a little shaky on my feet and wondering how I was going to walk all the way to school. I figured that once I was here, I could find some way to teach sitting down if I needed to. But it was the actual getting here that concerned me. So I packed up my school things, left my house, and slowly started to walk down my sidewalk. And right at that very moment, who should pull up to the end of my sidewalk (with the sound of resounding trumpets and heavenly hosts singing hallelujah, of course) on his giant motorbike and ask me ever-so-suavely "Mau ikut?" (wanna ride?). My good friend, HOTJAGA! I told him I absolutely wanted a ride, so he drove me to school. Great timing. What a blessing.

There are few things the Javanese love more than some juicy gossip. They will go to great lengths to invent something good to talk about even if everybody knows it's not true. So of course, once hotjaga dropped me off outside my classroom and rode off into the sunset... er... sunrise, my Indonesian co-workers started to ask me, "Did he spend the night at your house?"

*forehead palm slap*