Getting Sick in a Second Language (Part II)

A Sore Head Cured the Old Fashioned Way

I used to have headaches all the time when I worked in an office in the UK. Since I travelled to South America to learn Spanish this hasn’t generally been a problem but there was one day I ended up with a bad one. I got invited to a day in the countryside to have a barbeque and got burned to a crisp. At the disco afterwards my beaming red face must have been a picture under the strobe lights but my throbbing head was the biggest concern I had. I had never before thought of dancing cumbia and drinking singani as being a good headache cure but it turns out that it beats a couple of paracetamol any day.

Peas Make Me Pale

We’re back to the stomach again here I am afraid. I was completely alone in Bolivia and not one person back home even knew what country I was in as I hadn’t written since my last Spanish classes in Ecuador. One day I decided to eat an arvejada for lunch in a cheap and cheerful restaurant. Two hours later I was flat out on the bed wondering how long it would take my family to find out that I had died of pea related illness. Thankfully I had told a few locals where I lived and they come over to invite me out. Seeing me so pale and weak they made me some lovely soup and nursed me back to health despite not really knowing me at all.