Things have taken a small turn for the worse in the last 24 hours. Something I ate or drank or came in contact with has made me ill. The jury is still out on how bad it is going to be, but I can feel it building. The stomach cramps and the desperate rush to the bathroom is surely about to take over my life for the foreseeable future. This always happens, and I expect it, but I can’t be happy about it. The worst events usually begin the way this one is beginning, with a feeling of pressure and discomfort very high in my abdomen, almost in the chest. This means that whatever I ate or drank is so foul that my stomach has not even allowed it to enter my intestines. My stomach will simply lock itself off and whatever foul substance is brewing will stay there until it is ready to expel it. Then it comes back up the way it went down – through my mouth. I detest vomiting. It wracks my body and soul, and afterwards I’m shivering and desperate and weak as a kitten. I’m hoping that I will be able to avoid this state. The pressure and distension high in my body doesn’t always lead to that. Sometimes my stomach will relent. It decides that the threat has been reduced to the state that it can be allowed into my intestines. Then come the standard stomach cramps and diarrhea. That is never pleasant but it is better than the first option.

Whenever this happens, I become a food and drinks detective. I sift the clues and review my last few meals to see what dish or what drink could be the culprit. But it’s impossible to ever know for sure. I eat and drink so many things from so many different places that there’s no way to narrow it down. I trust the water in general here because most people with fruit juice stands and restaurants use filtered water now. But I doubt they all do. And they don’t wash their dishes in filtered water. I regularly eat at one place that gets all its water from a single big tub on the ground. I thought the tub was only for washing dishes, but then I saw them get water from that tub to add to the food. The water was for boiling noodles and for soup broth, but still. One day when I was there, I asked them where I could get water to wash my glasses after I dropped them in my noodles. They pointed to that tub. So I was cleaning my glasses in the same water that was used to make food. Not a good sign.

The other problem in my life consists of noisy neighbors. I’ve got the intense roar of traffic on one side. But I’ve also got another hotel room on the other side, and last night a very loud and very rude group arrived quite late. The walls are extremely thin, so noise carries easily. In fact, the entire wall bends and bulges when someone in that room touches it. It hardly matters, though, because the top two and a half feet of wall isn’t wall at all. It’s just a screen that goes around the entire room. I don’t know why they build this way, but I assume it is for air flow. It also shows the difference between cultures. No one would construct a room like this in Canada. We value our privacy too much, and we realize that noise will carry too easily. But in Asia in general, no one cares much about noise. That’s why I should really be careful when I call my new neighbors rude. They aren’t really being rude. They are just being themselves. It wouldn’t bother them if I made a lot of noise all night long and slammed doors and smoked cigarettes and threw garbage on the ground. That’s just normal behavior.

I’m interested in this idea of what is considered normal and how behavior is passed down from generation to generation. Yesterday, I saw something interesting. I was sitting in a plastic chair behind a row of drinks and snacks stands. I was having a mango juice. A woman and her two children sitting beside me were eating skewers of roasted meat in a spicy sauce on a banana leaf. By the time they were done, the place where they had been sitting looked like a war zone. When the children finished each skewer of meat, they just threw it on the ground. The sauce from the banana leaf was splashed all over the ground and the chairs. Every time a kid threw more garbage on the ground, I expected the mother to reprimand them. But, of course, she never did. She had grown up throwing her garbage on the ground. Her children saw her doing it and now they do it. Their children will also do it. You could argue that there is nothing wrong with this behavior. Everyone does it, and there are people that go around sweeping garbage up from the ground. You could say that it even creates jobs. Yet, there is a LOT of garbage everywhere. It makes the city look like a dump, and it has to be some kind of a health hazard, right? I’m not insane about dirt and cleanliness, but it makes sense that tons of garbage everywhere means more cockroaches and more rats and more mosquitoes and more diseases. The poor communities that I visit are often sitting on top of what looks like a carpet of garbage. It builds up in the water around the houses and eventually forms a thick layer.

Far worse for me personally is what one might call noise pollution. That is far more prevalent. The men in the room next door are currently screaming into their phones and, for some reason, beating their fists against the wall in a steady drum beat. One man was just down at the bathroom at the end of the hall. The men still in the room wanted to talk to him, and they just started yelling as loudly as they could. And this has been going on since they arrived past midnight last night. If I confronted them about all the noise, they wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. Noise? What noise? This is just life.

The other day, I was walking down the street and I was overwhelmed by the sound of generators. I’m not sure why there were so many, but a bunch of businesses had fired up a generator for power. These machines were placed on the ground right on the street outside their shop and the noise level was overwhelming. A friend of mine, Sri, stopped beside me in her father’s becak. We tried to have a conversation, but it was impossible. There was just too much noise for us to be heard. And no one thought this was a problem. The businesses beside the ones with the generators weren’t complaining. As far as noise goes, you can do what you want.

It rained all last night, and it is still raining this morning. So I’m happy to sit inside and drink coffee and play on the computer. I’m going a bit crazy (as usual) with all the new technology in my life. Every time I turn around, there is something new that I learned about the smartphone or there is some problem that I have to try to fix.

I went on another one of my photowalks yesterday. I was sick for most of the day, so I stayed in my room. But I didn’t want to waste the entire day, so I went outside with my camera around 4:00 p.m. I put on one of my favorite lenses – the 90mm. It’s a perfect little lens. It’s sharp and fast and very, very small. I love using it.

I walked over the bridge again and then found a whole new set of small streets to explore. I met a lot of people and took a lot of great pictures. I posted a big album on Facebook called “Tanjungbalai Across the Bridge.” In one area in particular, I ran into a lot of children. I took quite a few pictures of them, and then I posed for pictures with them. They took the pictures with their cell phones. I didn’t take any with any of my cameras this time. But I was happy to see that one person posted some pictures of me with some children. They’re great pictures.